A Search environment designates a set of one or more machines as being responsible for one of the following tasks:
Indexing your content. Each Search project has a single environment for indexing, which can be distributed across multiple hosts.
Answering end-user queries using the deployed index. A project can have any number of environments for this purpose. These environments should be hosted on machine optimized for high availability and performance.
Each Search project automatically includes one indexing environment and one answering environment (called “default”) on the local host. You can create additional environments to add more resources to these tasks.
Each environment has at least one associated host, each of which has a number of search engines specified for it. When the environment is in use, it will run up to the specified number of search engines to complete its task. ATG Search automatically distributes indexes to the hosts, creating as many instances as needed. See the ATG Search Installation and Configuration Guide for more information about search engines.
This chapter includes the following topics:
