Adobe MAX 2011 CF Unconference Presenation: Advanced Solr - Going Beyond the Basics of cfsearch

Posted At : October 3, 2011 4:15 PM | Posted by Jeff Coughlin
Related Categories: Solr,ColdFusion,Conferences

For those who attended my session on Monday and wanted to download the sample code, you can download it here (2.4MB zip file).

The code is ready to go (requires CF9 or better if you want to run it out of the box without having to download Solr on your own). Make sure to glance at the readme.txt file before you start. It also has some troubleshooting tips in case you can't get the code running right away.

I've separated each of the samples into include files (demo1.cfm, demo2.cfm, etc) to make it easy to follow. And I've also included a ton of really helpful notes at the top of each demo file that walks you through exactly what I discussed in my session.

I gave this same session at CF.Objective() 2011 earlier this year. So for those who already downloaded that code there isn't anything new for you (sorry). But I did update the live session with more helpful specifics based on feedback from CF.Objective().

Download and enjoy!

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cfObjective 2011 Presenation: Advanced Solr - Going Beyond the Basics of cfsearch

Posted At : June 6, 2011 2:17 PM | Posted by Jeff Coughlin
Related Categories: Solr,ColdFusion,Conferences,cfobjective

Last month I gave my presentation on some advanced solr use with ColdFusion at cf.objective() 2011.

Sorry for posting my files so late. I always like to post detailed comments in each demo file (explaining what's going on and how I walked through my demonstrations). I just needed to find the time to sit down for a couple hours and write them up. I also cleaned up the code a little better (based on feedback from the audience afterward) and I also styled the pagination used in the last demo (as well as a few other minor styling touches here and there).

Make sure to view the readme.txt file in order to set it up correctly for use. Basically you just need to edit your solr.xml file and tell it where your collection files are (takes 2 min). Then after restarting solr the demo will start working. I explain this in more detail with troubleshooting tips as well in the readme.txt file.

Also please note that I purposefully used bad coding practices and tried to keep the code needed to review inside of each demo file so that it's easy to follow for all audiences (sorry, no frameworks here :).

Download the presentation demo files here (2.4MB zip file). I didn't bother with the slides since they pretty much just jump right into the demos.

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Running ColdFusion Solr on a 64-bit JVM

Posted At : October 13, 2010 2:39 PM | Posted by Jeff Coughlin
Related Categories: Solr,ColdFusion,Adobe

One of my clients had the need for a lot of search collections and even more data to put in them (especially with massive archives of PDF files, xls, word docs, etc) for a very large intranet. So I tried to plan ahead by installing Solr on a separate server (Windows 2008 R2 64-bit with a decent chunk of RAM). You can find the separate installer on Adobe's website. For our initial tests it worked out great, but when we starting throwing more data at it, it quickly ran out of memory.

The first thing I did before I even created the first collection was to increase the memory for the JVM (to do this, edit the solr.lax file and change the default setting of -Xmx256m to your preferred max memory setting. I also prefer to set the min setting as well to the same value (see below)). What I quickly found was the the default version of the Solr install comes with a 32-bit version of Jetty. The 32-bit JVM maxes out at 1.5GB of RAM use. So even though we had enough RAM to use and were running on a 64-bit OS, the JVM wasn't being allowed to use the extra memory.

The solution ended up being very simple (even for a non-java person like myself). I downloaded a 64-bit JVM (in my case I just downloaded Sun's 64-bit JDK to test. I suggest the JRE though) and installed it on the box. I edited the solr.lax file and commented out the single line where Jetty calls javaw.exe (for Windows its that file, for other OS's it will be sloght different with a different path format) and instead pointed it to the new 64-bit JVM's javaw.exe file.

I then set the min and max memory settings to 3GB (-Xms3072m -Xmx3072m) and started Solr up. No more out of memory errors (no more java heap errors).

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I didn't figure it out all on my own though. Several people helped me come to the final result that I'd like to thank (in order of me bugging them): Mark Mandel, Matt Woodward, and Sean Coyne

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