Webinator Performance

[velevi]

Hi.
I have a brief question on performance and your opinion.

We are using Webinator to index a number of sites that belong to one big group of sites. We have subgroupings of the entire list that we let users search as separate logical entities. For instance, we have 21 sites; we let the user search all, or a subsection of 11 site, or another subsection of 9.

Is it better to index sites separately in individual (smaller) profiles (even if sites will be doubly/triply indexed)? Would we have slower searches if we had one big profile with all? We are indexing all profiles & sites separately and daily! Will we realize big performance increases if we didn't index them separately?

Here are the statistics of the sites for Dec 05:

Profile with all sites: ~7000 pages, ~732 MB, 1160 searches
Profile with Subgroup 1: ~4000 pages, ~330 MB, 770 searches
Profile with Subgroup 2: ~1000 pages, ~250 MB, n/a (not tested yet)

There are a few individual sites that are also in the list of all sites, and are yet indexed separately.
Subsite 1: ~600 pages, 17MB, 4500 searches
Subsite 2: ~2000 pages, 30MB, 800 searches

Is it a big performance hit to search speed if we used one big profile for all site subgroups?
Which way should we go?
Thank you

NOTE: we are using the Professional Webinator, version 5.

[mark]

Obviously walking the sites multiple times will be slower. Walking them all together in one profile will be faster and less burden on the servers being walked and the walker. Doing a category search on the all profile will be slightly slower than individual profiles. But probably not bad with the size of your data.