Question

The search index is stored in the FogBugz database (note: not as part of the database's native full-text index), but can be moved to disk in rare cases where it might help with corruption or performance issues.

Answer 1

Note: you shouldn't need to move your search index unless directed to do so by Fog Creek technical support as a debugging step.

Contraindications: If more than one webserver is running FogBugz, as in a cluster environment, do not use this feature. Sharing the MainIndex directory between machines has not been tested.

Moving the index location to disk:

1. Stop the FogBugz maintenance service.
2. Set fStoreIndexInDatabase in the registry:
   • Windows
     In HKLM\SOFTWARE\Fog Creek Software\FogBugz\INSTALLPATH in the Windows registry (where "INSTALLPATH" is the path of your hosted FogBugz installation), create a new string value "fStoreIndexInDatabase" and set its value to 0
   • Linux
     In /opt/fogbugz/Accessories/application.data, create a line "fStoreIndexInDatabase=0" (without quotes)
3. After changing the setting, a reset of the search index is required so that FogBugz knows to re-index everything.

This will cause the FogBugz installation at INSTALLPATH to store the entire search index on disk. It will be stored as a series of files in the Accessories/MainIndex directory. This path is not configurable.

Exporting the existing index to disk is not recommended (once corrupted, always corrupted). It's not possible to toggle between the settings without a reset. Doing so will result in incomplete search results, but there will not be a diagnostic.

Answer 2

Some additional considerations:

1. This has known index stability issues (you might have to mash 'reset' a few times to get indexing to start up again), though it generally does ok once it's working.
2. This causes the Full-Text Search index to be stored exclusively on the webhost, so if you have multiple webhosts connected to a single database, you'll have duplicate indices, and thus varying behavior between webhosts.
3. This severs many links between the FogBugz Database and its webhost -- in cases where the DB is a bottleneck, this can be a large performance gain for searching and indexing.