Datashare
DownloadAbout ICIJGitHub
  • About Datashare
  • Ask for help
  • Concepts
    • Running modes
    • CLI stages
  • About ICIJ
  • Github
  • 💻On your computer
    • About the local mode
    • Install on Mac
      • Start Datashare
      • Add documents to Datashare
    • Install on Windows
      • Start Datashare
      • Add documents to Datashare
    • Install on Linux
      • Start Datashare
      • Add documents to Datashare
    • Install with Docker
    • Add documents
    • Add more languages
    • Install plugins and extensions
    • Neo4j
      • Install Neo4j plugin
      • Create and update Neo4j graph
  • 🌐On your server
    • About the server mode
    • Install with Docker
    • Add documents from the CLI
    • Add entities from the CLI
    • Authentication providers
      • OAuth2
      • Basic with a database
      • Basic with Redis
      • Dummy
    • Neo4j
      • Install Neo4j plugin
      • Create and update Neo4j graph
    • Performance considerations
  • ⚡Usage
    • Search documents
    • Search documents in batch
    • Search with operators / Regex
    • Filter documents
    • Sort documents
    • Explore a document
    • Star documents
    • Tag documents
    • Recommend documents
    • Keyboard shortcuts
    • Create a Neo4j graph and explore it
    • FAQ
      • General
        • Can I use Datashare with no internet connection?
        • Can I download a document from Datashare?
        • Can I remove document(s) from Datashare?
        • Do you recommend OS or machines for large corpuses?
        • Can I use an external drive as data source?
        • How can we use Datashare on a collaborative mode on a server?
        • How can I contact ICIJ for help, bug reporting or suggestions?
        • Why results from a simple search and a batch search can be slightly different?
        • How can I uninstall Datashare?
        • Advanced: how can I do bulk actions with Tarentula?
        • What should I do if I get more than 10,000 results?
        • How to run Neo4j?
      • Definitions
        • What is a named entity?
        • What are NLP pipelines?
        • What is fuzziness?
        • What are proximity searches?
      • Common errors
        • 'Your search query is wrong.' What should I do?
        • Searching with double quotes doesn't work
        • List of common errors leading to "failure" in Batch Searches
        • What if Datashare says 'No documents found'?
        • Nothing works, everything crashes. What can I do?
        • What if tasks are 'running' but not completing?
        • 'You are not allowed to use Docker, you must be in the "docker-users" group'. What should I do?
        • What if a 'Preview' of my documents is 'not available'?
        • What do I do if Datashare opens a blank screen in my browser?
        • I see people, organizations and locations in the filters but not in the documents
        • What does 'Windows named pipe error' mean?
        • Datashare doesn't open. What should I do?
        • I upgraded to version 9 of Datashare and it fails.
  • 🤓Developers
    • How to contribute
    • Backend
      • API
      • API (deprecated)
      • Database
    • Frontend
      • JSDoc
      • Plugin hooks
      • Insight widgets
      • Vue app
        • Components
          • Api
          • AppliedSearchFilters
          • AppliedSearchFiltersItem
          • AppNav
          • AppSidebar
          • BatchDownloadActions
          • BatchSearchActions
          • BatchSearchClearFilters
          • BatchSearchCopyForm
          • BatchSearchFilterDate
          • BatchSearchFilterQuery
          • BatchSearchForm
          • BatchSearchResultsDetails
          • BatchSearchResultsFilters
          • BatchSearchResultsTable
          • BatchSearchStatus
          • BatchSearchTable
          • ColumnChartPicker
          • ColumnFilter
          • ColumnFilterBadge
          • ColumnFilterDropdown
          • ContentTypeBadge
          • Document
            • DocumentNavbar
            • DocumentNotes
            • DocumentTabDetails
            • DocumentTabExtractedText
            • DocumentTabNamedEntities
            • DocumentTabPreview
            • Viewers
              • AudioViewer
              • ImageViewer
              • JsonViewer
              • LegacySpreadsheetViewer
              • PaginatedViewer
              • SpreadsheetViewer
              • TiffViewer
              • VideoViewer
          • DocumentActions
          • DocumentAttachments
          • DocumentContent
          • DocumentContentSlice
          • DocumentContentSlicePlaceholder
          • DocumentContentSlices
          • DocumentGlobalSearchTermsTags
          • DocumentInModal
          • DocumentLocalSearchInput
          • DocumentSlicedName
          • DocumentTagsForm
          • DocumentThread
          • DocumentThumbnail
          • DocumentTranslatedContent
          • DocumentTypeCard
          • EllipseStatus
          • EmailString
          • Extensions
          • ExtractingForm
          • ExtractingFormOcrControl
          • ExtractingLanguageFormControl
          • Filter
            • FilterBoilerplate
            • FilterFooter
            • FilterSearch
            • FilterSortByDropdown
            • Types
              • FilterAbstract
              • FilterDate
              • FilterDateRange
              • FilterNamedEntity
              • FilterPath
              • FilterProject
              • FilterRecommendedBy
              • FilterStarred
              • FilterText
          • FiltersPanel
          • FindNamedEntitiesForm
          • Hook
          • InlineDirectoryPicker
          • JsonFormatter
          • LocalesMenu
          • MountedDataLocation
          • NamedEntityInContext
          • PageHeader
          • PageIcon
          • Pagination
          • Plugins
          • ProjectCards
          • ProjectForm
          • ProjectLink
          • ProjectSelector
          • ProjectThumbnail
          • QuickItemNav
          • ResetFiltersButton
          • RouterLinkPopup
          • ScrollTracker
          • SearchBar
          • SearchBarInput
          • SearchBarInputDropdown
          • SearchBarInputDropdownForField
          • SearchBarInputDropdownForProjects
          • SearchDocumentNavbar
          • SearchFormControl
          • SearchLayoutSelector
          • SearchResults
          • SearchResultsGrid
          • SearchResultsHeader
          • SearchResultsList
          • SearchResultsListLink
          • SearchResultsTable
          • ServerSettings
          • ShortkeysModal
          • TaskItemStatus
          • TasksList
          • TreeBreadcrumb
          • TreeView
          • UserDisplay
          • UserHistorySaveSearchForm
          • VersionNumber
          • Widget
            • WidgetDiskUsage
            • WidgetDocumentsByCreationDate
            • WidgetDocumentsByCreationDateByPath
            • WidgetDuplicates
            • WidgetEmpty
            • WidgetEntities
            • WidgetFieldFacets
            • WidgetFileBarometer
            • WidgetListGroup
            • WidgetNames
            • WidgetNested
            • WidgetProject
            • WidgetRecommendedBy
            • WidgetSearchBar
            • WidgetText
            • WidgetTreeMap
        • Pages
          • App
          • DocumentModal
          • DocumentStandalone
          • DocumentView
          • Error
          • Landing
          • Login
          • Project
          • ProjectList
          • ProjectNew
          • ProjectView
          • ProjectViewAddDocuments
          • ProjectViewEdit
          • ProjectViewFindNamedEntities
          • ProjectViewInsights
          • Search
          • Settings
          • TaskAnalysis
          • TaskAnalysisList
          • TaskBatchDownload
          • TaskBatchDownloadList
          • TaskBatchSearch
          • TaskBatchSearchList
          • TaskBatchSearchNew
          • TaskBatchSearchView
          • TaskBatchSearchViewResults
          • Tasks
          • UserHistory
          • UserHistoryDocumentList
          • UserHistorySavedSearchList
    • Introduction to Tarentula
    • Index operations with Playground
    • Write extensions
    • Write plugins
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Datashare is an open source project by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists

On this page
  • Separate Processing Stages
  • Distribute the INDEX Stage
  • Leverage Parallelism
  • Optimize ElasticSearch
  • Adjust JAVA_OPTS
  • Specify Document Language
  • Manage OCR Tasks Wisely
  • Efficient Handling of Large Files
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  1. On your server

Performance considerations

Last updated 1 year ago

Improving the performance of Datashare involves several techniques and configurations to ensure efficient data processing. Extracting text from multiple file types and images is an heavy process so be aware that even if we take care of getting the best performances possible with and , this process can be expensive. Below are some tips to enhance the speed and performance of your Datashare setup.

Separate Processing Stages

Execute the SCAN and INDEX stages independently to optimize resource allocation and efficiency.

Examples:

datashare --mode CLI --stage SCAN --redisAddress redis://redis:6379 --busType REDIS
datashare --mode CLI --stage INDEX --redisAddress redis://redis:6379 --busType REDIS

Distribute the INDEX Stage

Distribute the INDEX stage across multiple servers to handle the workload efficiently. We often use multiple instances (32 CPUs, 128 GB of memory) with a remote Redis and a remote ElasticSearch instance to alleviate processing load.

For projects like the (2.94 TB), we ran the INDEX stage to up to 10 servers at the same time which cost ICIJ several thousand of dollars.

Leverage Parallelism

Datashare offer --parallelism and --parserParallelism options to enhance processing speed.

Example (for g4dn.8xlarge with 32 CPUs):

datashare --mode CLI --stage INDEX --parallelism 14 --parserParallelism 14
datashare --mode CLI --stage NLP --parallelism 14 --nlpParallelism 14

Optimize ElasticSearch

ElasticSearch can significantly consume CPU and memory, potentially becoming a bottleneck. For production instance of Datashare, we recommend deploying ElasticSearch on a remote server to improve performances.

Adjust JAVA_OPTS

You can fine-tune the JAVA_OPTS environment variable based on your system's configuration to optimize Java Virtual Machine memory usage. Example (for g4dn.8xlarge8with 120 GB Memory):

JAVA_OPTS="-Xms10g -Xmx50g" datashare --mode CLI --stage INDEX

Specify Document Language

If the document language is known, explicitly setting it can save processing time.

  • Use --language for general language setting (e.g., FRENCH, ENGLISH).

  • Use --ocrLanguage for OCR tasks to specify the Tesseract model (e.g., fra, eng).

Example:

datashare --mode CLI --stage INDEX --language FRENCH --ocrLanguage fra
datashare --mode CLI --stage INDEX --language CHINESE --ocrLanguage chi_sim
datashare --mode CLI --stage INDEX --language GREEK --ocrLanguage ell

Manage OCR Tasks Wisely

OCR tasks are resource-intensive. If not needed, disabling OCR can significantly improve processing speed. You can disable OCR with --ocr false.

Example:

datashare --mode CLI --stage INDEX --ocr false

Efficient Handling of Large Files

Large PST files or archives can hinder processing efficiency. We recommend extract these files before processing with Datashare. If they are too many of them, keep in mind Datashare will be able to extract them anyway.

readpst -reD <Filename>.pst

Example to split Outlook PST files in multiple .eml files with :

🌐
readpst
Apache Tika
Tesseract OCR
g4dn.8xlarge
Pandora Papers