Official recommendation regarding Windows Drive Indexing for IRIS/Caché data drives
I am currently managing environments running InterSystems IRIS and Caché on Windows servers.
I’m reviewing storage optimization best practices and I have a question regarding a specific Windows drive setting: "Allow files on this drive to have contents indexed in addition to file properties."
Based on my research, everything indicates that it is better to disable this option, especially on drives used by databases. However, I couldn't find a specific "official" stance in the documentation explicitly mentioning this checkbox.
My questions are:
- Is there an official recommendation from InterSystems regarding disabling content indexing for drives hosting database files (.dat), journals, and WIJ?
- Does anyone have experience with performance gains or avoiding "disk busy" bottlenecks by disabling this feature?
- Besides indexing, are there any other recommended Windows parameters or system settings that should be adjusted to optimize database performance?.
I want to ensure the OS isn't competing with the IRIS write daemon for disk resources.
Comments
If you need " official recommendation" you should contact InterSystems WRC, this is a Developer Community.
Is there an official recommendation from InterSystems regarding disabling content indexing for drives hosting database files (.dat), journals, and WIJ?
I'm fairly sure that the search indexing is disabled by default on Windows Server, so there's a good chance that it's not something that comes up frequently enough to make it into documentation as an official position.
However it does make sense to disable it for specific locations such as the location of the database and journals etc if you have indexing turned on for the server as a whole.
any folder(s) that have IRIS/Cache databases and other components (WIJ, journals) should be excluded from any antivirus/defender. See: Configuring Third-Party Software to Work in Conjunction with InterSystems Products | System Administration Guide | InterSystems IRIS Data Platform 2025.3
I would also exclude those from any indexing services, which will leave a good bandwidth & throughput to IRIS/Cache itself.
Depending on your server (on-prem or cloud) and the disks that you use, it might help to segregate IRIS/Cache databases and other components (WIJ, journals) across different disks.