Knowledgebase:
My forests are taking a long time to mount - what should I do?
16 February 2021 03:17 PM

Summary

When restarting very large forests, some customers have noted that it may take a while for them to mount. While the forests are mounting, the database is unable to come online, thus impacting the availability of your main site. This article shows you how to change a few database settings to improve forest-mounting time.

 


 

When encountering delays with forest mounting time after restarts, we usually recommend the following settings:

format-compatibility set to the latest format
expunge-locks set to none
index-detection set to none

Additionally, some customers might be able to spread out the work of memory mapping forest indexes by setting preload-mapped-data to false - though it should be noted that instead of the necessary time being taken during the mounting of the forest, memory-mapped file data will be loaded on demand through page faults as the server accesses it.

While the above settings should help with forest mounting time, in general, their effects can be situationally dependent. You can read more about each of these settings in our documentation here: http://docs.marklogic.com/admin-help/database. In particular:


1) Regarding format compatability: "The automatic detection occurs during database startup and after any database configuration changes, and can take some time and system resources for very large forests and for very large clusters. The default value of automatic is recommended for most installations." So to your question, while automatic is recommended in most cases, you should try changing the setting if you're seeing long forest mount times.

2) Regarding expunge-locks: "Setting this to none is only recommended to speed cluster startup time for extremely large clusters. The default setting of automatic, which cleans up the locks as they expire, is recommended for most installations."

3) Regarding index-detection: "This detection occurs during database startup and after any database configuration changes, and can take some time and system resources for very large forests and for very large clusters. Setting this to none also causes queries to use the current database index settings, even if some settings have not completed reindexing. The default value of automatic is recommended for most installations"

It may also be worth considering why forests are taking a long time to mount. If your data size has grown significantly over the lifetime of the affected database, it might be the case that your forests are now overly large, in which case a better approach might be to instead distribute the data across more forests.

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