Anyone use TeamSite Search?

System

DevNetters -

Our configuration: two Linux VMs; one with TeamSite 7.3.2 / OpenDeploy Base, the other with OpenDeploy Admin and TeamSite Search.

Here's my question: does anyone successfully use TeamSite Search, at any release level on any platform?

Here's why I'm asking:
We worked for a couple of months with TeamSite Support to try to get the 7.3.1 version of Search working. That Support ticket ended up with pretty much the conclusion that 7.3.1 Search was unworkable for us and that we needed to upgrade to 7.3.2 Search.

So we did the upgrade to TeamSite and Search - we're now on the 7.3.2 version of both. The install / upgrade process went pretty smoothly.

Now, we're a month into another Support ticket trying to get the basic functionality of 7.3.2 Search working. We've gotten a lot further than we had with 7.3.1; occasionally we can successfully index a branch and perform a search on the indexed content.

However, we've run into a pile of other issues:
- When we try to stop and start the indexing process (iw.tsconnector it's called in 7.3.2), the indexing process doesn't seem to stop right away - it leaves the older process running in the job list for some indeterminate amount of time during which bringing the Indexer back creates an issue where it thinks we're already attached to Search. We need to wait a couple of hours to retry (the older versions of Indexer do eventually 'go away').

- In the Search UI, any query that takes over 30 seconds will time out and appear to fail to the user. In the background, that query still is processing and eventually is successful, but by then the session is no longer active and the user gets no results. We've messed with some config options to try to keep this communication open, but haven't been successful yet.

- If there's an error during the indexing process, sometimes we'll see a status of 'indexed' anyway. We see the results of this when we try to query a branch and get 'no results' when searching for either filenames or content that should have been indexed. In this case, we would like to be able to have some consistent process to 1) drop the index for the branch and 2) reindex the branch. Even after months of working with Support and testing this out, it still seems like a hit-and-miss process of guessing what processes need to be brought down and back up and what commands need to be executed at what particular time during this process.

And there's a handful more. You get the idea.


Given our experiences, I'm wondering if -anyone- has TeamSite Search running smoothly? Anybody? It would be good to have the peace of mind that it is possible to provide this functionality.