Recovery of a document serving environment

• US 8,990,612 B2
• Filed: 04/08/2011
• Issued: 03/24/2015
• Est. Priority Date: 04/08/2011
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC (Microsoft Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC (Microsoft Corporation)
• Inventors: Yuan, Daniel, Sharman, Neil, Jain, Utkarsh, Goyal, Jay, Sharma, Vibhaakar, Deshpande, Vinay
• Primary Examiner(s): BUTLER, SARAI E
• Application Number:
  US13/082,912
• Publication Number:
  US 20120260124A1
• Time in Patent Office: 1,446 Days
• Field of Search: 714/4.11, 714/4.1, 714/25, 714/2, 714/11
• US Class Current: 714/4.11
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/1658 Data re-synchronization of a redundant component, or initial sync of replacement, additional or spare unit
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/203 using migration
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/2038 with a single idle spare processing component
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/2048 where the redundant components share neither address space nor persistent storage
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/93 Document management systems

Abstract

Methods and systems for quickly serving documents are provided. Documents may be served to users, for example, in response to search query inputs. Documents may be individually communicated to a document server individually prior to batching the documents. In such a real-time serving system, serving components may fail. To ensure real-time serving despite the failure, spares are utilized to replace the failing serving components such that the spare can immediately begin receiving documents. The spare can also be synchronized with other serving components to obtain the memory of the failing serving component prior to the failure.

Claims

1. A system for serving documents, the system comprising:

one or more processors coupled to a computer storage medium, the computer storage medium having stored thereon a plurality of computer software components executable by the processor, the computer software components comprising;

a managing component that;

identifies a first document server of a plurality of document servers associated with a document distributor, wherein the document distributor receives individual documents to communicate to each document server of the plurality of document servers;

identifies that the first document server is failing such that it is not receiving individual documents from the document distributor and the first document server is not individually serving documents to a user prior to a batching process where the individual documents are grouped together;

a recording component that records data accumulation, wherein data accumulation is any data accumulated on the plurality of document servers since the first document server failed;

a replacement component that replaces the first document server with a second document server; and

an updating component that synchronizes the second document server with each of the plurality of document servers such that they are identical.

2. The system of claim 1, wherein individual documents include websites, web pages, and the like.

3. The system of claim 1, further comprising a serving component that serves the individual documents from the second document server once the synchronization is complete.

4. The system of claim 3, wherein the document is served to the user in response to receiving a search query input.

5. The system of claim 1, wherein the recording component records the data accumulation while the system is simultaneously serving documents.

6. The system of claim 1, wherein the second document server was running in the background prior to the failure of the first document server such that data received by the first document server prior to the failure is included on the second document server.

7. The system of claim 1, wherein synchronizing the second document server with each of the plurality of document servers includes identifying which document server of the plurality of document servers includes data received subsequent to the failure of the first document server.

8. The system of claim 7, wherein the updating component is further configured to synchronize the second document server with each of the plurality of document servers by:

accessing various portions of the data received subsequent to the failure of the first document server from various document servers of the plurality of document servers; and

copying the data received subsequent to the failure of the first document server to the second document server.

9. The system of claim 1, wherein the second document server receives individual documents from the document distributor upon replacing the first document server.

10. One or more computer storage media devices, having computer-executable instructions embodied thereon that, when executed by a computing system having a processor and a memory perform a method, the method comprising:

identifying a current load of an index unit associated with a document distributor in a first layout, wherein the current load of the index unit is a number of individual documents received by the index unit, and wherein the index unit includes one or more document servers associated with the document distributor where the one or more documents servers individually serve individual documents;

receiving an indication that a total load of the index unit is increasing;

creating a second layout including at least one additional index unit compared to the first layout;

transferring data associated with the first layout to the second layout until the first layout has transferred all data associated therewith while simultaneously balancing a load between the first layout and the second layout; and

identifying the second layout as a primary layout such that all data is communicated directly to the second layout.

11. The one or more computer-storage media devices of claim 10, further comprising removing the first layout.

12. The one or more computer-storage media devices of claim 10, further comprising balancing the total load of both the first layout and the second layout and a total number of documents served from both the first layout and the second layout.

13. The one or more computer-storage media devices of claim 10, wherein an increase of the total load of the index unit is when a number of individual documents received by the index unit is increased.

14. The one or more computer-storage media devices of claim 13, further comprising reallocating responsibilities of the index unit to compensate for the at least one additional index unit in the second layout.

15. The one or more computer-storage media devices of claim 14, wherein reallocation of responsibilities allows for data to be communicated directly to the at least one additional index unit.

16. A method for serving documents, the method comprising:

receiving, at a document distributor, an individual document that is available from a document provider, wherein the document is any web document;

communicating the individual document to a plurality of document servers associated with the document distributor, wherein the plurality of document servers receive documents only from the associated document distributor;

identifying, by a computing device having a processor and a memory, that a first document server of the plurality of document servers is failing and is not individually serving documents to a user prior to a batching process where the individual documents are grouped together;

identifying a sequence point, where the sequence point is a time at which the first document server failed and was no longer receiving documents;

reassigning the failing document server'"'"'s responsibilities to a second document server such that any documents received after the sequence point are received by the second document server; and

updating the second document server such that it is identical to each document server in the plurality of document servers.

17. The method of claim 16, wherein updating the second document server includes copying data prior to the sequence point from each of the remaining document servers of the plurality of document servers to the second document server.

18. The method of claim 16, further comprising communicating a notification to each of the remaining document servers of the plurality of document servers indicating that each document server should record data accumulation.

19. The method of claim 18, wherein data accumulation is any data received by the plurality of document servers subsequent to the sequence point.

20. The method of claim 16, wherein serving documents from the second document server once the second document server is updated and identical to each other document server within the plurality of document servers.