In a production environment, Search Administration and the client application run in separate Oracle ATG Web Commerce instances, on separate machines, with two instances of the latter to provide redundancy. Communication between instances is handled by the DAF.Search.Routing module. Note that this module must be able to communicate with the Search database.

This recommended architecture uses the Search Administration instance for indexing content, with several standalone engines to serve answers to end-user queries. The dark gray box in the lower right represents any number of hosts you might assign to one or more production environments, running as many search engines as your hardware will support.

The diagram also includes Oracle ATG Web Commerce Business Intelligence. Note that your data loaders must run in a dedicated instance, separate from your application and from Search.

Application Redundancy and Dedicated Engine Resources

If your content set is large enough, serving answers requires more than one search engine, each of which should have a dedicated CPU and at least two cores per engine. An index is composed of one or more logical partitions, each of which is associated with a content set configured in Search Administration. Each logical partition is composed of one or more physical partitions. Each physical partition is served by a search engine. Each engine has its own copy of the physical partition it serves.