The indexing process automatically determines the number of physical partitions required by your content, and adjusts this number as your content size changes. However, you may want to assign a higher minimum number of partitions in order to speed up your indexing process. Some situations where this setting might apply are:
You are creating a new index from previously existing content sets, and already know the number of physical partitions needed.
Your content set size changes frequently and significantly.
You already know that your content set is close to needing an additional partition.
Oracle ATG Web Commerce Search always creates at least the number of physical partitions you specify (it adds more if they are needed), regardless of the size of that content. Therefore, as long as your content fits within the specified minimum number of partitions, indexing can proceed without recalculating the number of partitions required, which slows down the indexing process.
Having a higher number of physical partitions than required results in less content per partition and faster indexing, since partitions can be indexed in parallel. Note that in order for indexing to proceed efficiently, your machine needs to have sufficient CPUs to support that number of Search engines (each partition has its own engine).
You can adjust the minimum partition through the Edit link on your content sets in Search Administration. See Editing Content Sets in this guide.
