Search-Primary Container
The Search Primary Server indexes Commerce data using Apache Solr and makes the data available for the Search Secondary Servers. For more information about the Search application, see Search Server in Elastic Path Commerce.
Prerequisites
The search container image must be built and available. For information on building container images, see Building Container Images.
Suitable Environment Types
The Search-Primary application is a core application and is always deployed.
| Include in Development and QA Environments? | Include in Authoring Environments? | Include in Live Environments? |
|---|---|---|
| Yes | Yes | Yes |
Configuration
The sections below describe typical configurations.
Note about production sizing and tuning
The values shared in this document are suggestions that are known to work well in typical scenarios.
important
Planning and validation is required to finalize resource and scaling settings for production. The settings should be reviewed and re-validated periodically, such as when significant Commerce application changes are deployed or when traffic and load requirements change. For more information, see the Elastic Path Commerce Sizing Guide.
Resource allocation
Resource allocation can vary by usage and load. Below are typical values.
| Resource | Non Production | Production Like (See Note) |
|---|---|---|
| Container Memory (MB) | 3072 | 3072 |
| Container Cores | 0.5 | 3 |
| Java Heap (MB) | 2048 | 2048 |
Scaling and replicas
This service is a singleton and should not be scaled.
| Configuration | Non Production | Production Like (See Note) |
|---|---|---|
| Minumim Replicas | 1 | 1 |
| Maximum Replicas | 1 | 1 |
| Max Surge (%) | 25 | 100 |
| Max Unavailable (%) | 25 | 0 |
Ports
| Port | Non Production | Production | Purpose | Comment |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 8080 | Yes | Yes | Exposes the search data and services. | This port must be accessible to all of the search-secondary containers in the Commerce environment, and can be exposed to developer and administrators to view status information about of the appolication and the indices. |
| 8180 | Yes | Yes | Health and liveness checks. | This port should only be exposed internally, ideally only to the container orchestrator. |
| 8888 | Optional | Optional | JMX. | The container listens on this port when the ENABLE_JMX environment variable is set to true. This port should only be exposed internally to users and tools that require access to JMX data. |
| 1081 | Optional | No | Java debugger. | The container will listen on this port when the ENABLE_DEBUG environment variable is set to true. This port should only be exposed internally, to developers who debug Java application code. This port is typically not open in production. |
Health, Liveness and Readiness
Container orchestration tools monitor the health and responsiveness of containers. For information about supported endpoints, see Health Monitoring Usage.
Volumes
| Mount Point | Purpose | Comment |
|---|---|---|
| /ep/solrHome-master/data | Store search index data. | The file system should be available wherever the search-primary container is scheduled. If the container restarts on a different compute node, the file system should be avaialble so the search index data does not need to be recreated. 100GB is the recommended size. |
| /hdump | Store Java heap dump files, which are created when a Java OutOfMemoryError occurs, on a filesystem that persists after the container dies. These files are large but can be very helpful to diagnose Java memory usage issues. | Each heap dump file can be multiple gigabytes in size so it is important to ensure that the filesystem is large and regularly maintained so that it does not fill up. Consider using a shared filesystem filesystem across all containers for this purpose. |
Environment Variables
The application is configured using container environment variables. Some environment variables must be set and some are optional. The environment variables are read and consumed by the container entrypoint scripts. Review Common Environment Variables for a list of required and optional environment variables that are common to all Commerce application services.
The following table shows additional environment variables specific to this service:
| Variable Name | Description | Required |
|---|---|---|
EP_SEARCH_ROLE | On the primary, set this to: master. | Yes |
EP_SEARCH_MASTER_URL | Used to set the Java property ep.search.master.url. It should be a valid URL that refers to the search service on the search primary. An example is http://searchmasterhostname:8082/search. | Yes |
EP_SEARCH_X_JVM_ARGS | Can be used to set additional custom Java arguments. | No |
important
The entrypoint scripts are and will remain the source of truth on the required environment variables. Review the container entrypoint scripts in your selected release to validate the required variables.