FAST ESP 5.x - Indexer and Large Addresses Awareness

Hi Search Enthusiasts

I wanted to share an important update that has been made in indexer for Win32 platform.

As you might know, 32-bit process don't address more than 2 GB of Memory by default on Windows platform. To allow them to go all the way to 4GB (usually when hosted on a 64-bit OS), you need to configure the /LARGEADDRESSAWARE flag at linkage time.

See https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/wz223b1z(v=vs.110).aspx 

You can see that flag in any binary, by using the Dumpbin utility (https://support.microsoft.com/kb/177429) and the /HEADERS switch.

Check for the presence of the following message : "Application can handle large (>2GB) addresses" in the FILE HEADERS section.

So far in ESP 5.x, only the fixmlindex and fsearch processes had that flag set. With the release of the latest search engine patch aka esp.5.3.SP5.searchengine.patch02.Win32 , the indexer.exe is now able to address 4GB of Memory.

This improvement should mitigate errors like "Indexer RTSearch: Component is out of memory".

Stay tuned.