I would like to chat with people about their experience with this software.
What hardware do you use?
How much memory do you have installed?
How many cores are running?
How many GBs of data can you process per day?
How stable are your systems processing large data amounts?
If you use Nuix on a regular basis as I do and would like to share your experiences please post below.
Nuix Desktop (ND) is really hardware intensive in that the more your give it the quicker it will obviously go. ND will utilise ever last bit of the hardware I/O you throw at it but largely depends what version of ND you are using. ND comes in both 32/64 bit and also an enterprise version which is not restricted and can utilise as many worker PC's as you have available, assuming you have the right backbone. In saying that here are some specs for you based on one of our older servers processing normal Microsoft Office Data (Docs and PST's) and MBOX data.
What hardware/software do you use including cores and RAM
- Windows 2003 SP2 (32bit)
- Nuix Desktop (32bit)(licensing restricted to two cores)
- 2 x 2.8 GHz Xeons
- 6GB RAM
- Seagate 10,000 RPM drives in striped array
How many GBs of data can you process per day?
- This can index 4GB an hour of data, but is obviously severely limited by the CPU, RAM and 32bit software we are running.
- This can export at 2GB an hour as of version 2.14.8 but will move in mulitcore/threaded export in the next few versions.
How stable are your systems processing large data amounts?
- Stability aaah everyone’s favorite questions. I have never had ND crash hardware although I have had ND crash and freeze, but you just kill the process/threads then reopen ND and it will continue where it left off. Also as a side note to mitigate any stability or lack of grunt issues usually it is best to index in chunks. For example index all managers on one machine, index all senior managers on another machine then combine the indexes, which will instantly dedupe between the two cases.
ND Notes
- The default 32-bit version of ND will only utilise 1.3GB of RAM per core and is still potentially limited by your licensing agreement.
- The default 64-bit version of ND utilises as much RAM per core as possible but is still potentially limited by your licensing agreement.
- The enterprise version of ND is usually 64bit and can utilize local and remote workers. Personally this version is best run on say a server with 6 quad cores at 3 GHz with 256GB of RAM and raided SAS storage you would see about 1TB of data in a 24 period processed. Now added a few more of these servers as workers via 8 GB fiber and well need I say more.
RAM RAM and more RAM !
This is the key to running Nuix well. I have tried boxes with 2GB using XP-32bit, then 4-8GB RAM using Vista-64bit. Some improvement but nothing great. I always ended up with massive pagefile access which brings processing to a halt. But now I have upgraded to the maximum 32GB on my Dual CPU Xeon (4 x Cores) and now this box really crunches some data.
My advice is to monitor your pagefile activity. I had a 6GB PST take 16 hours to process on a computer that only had 4GB RAM (Vista-64bit) even though it was a 2 x Dual Xeon workstation. Once the RAM was max'ed out and Server 2008 64bit installed it processed in under 1 hour.
Hi,
A big impact on processing time with Nuix is the options selected with processing - in particular the "Store Binary Items" option. This basically stores a copy of everything locally under the case so that it can be quickly accessed once indexed. Turning this off increases processing speed and load - however it has the obvious side effect of making the use of the program slower, as the content has to be retrieved from the mail store. There is also others like Skin Tone Analysis etc which has an impact on processing time.
I tend to only use Nuix on individual mail files, so find that it runs ok on my exceedingly average laptop. Having said this I do actually run it on a fairly standard-spec server and it motors along rather nicely.
Hope that helps…
Our lab evaluated ND earlier this year.
ND was installed on a HP server (2x QC Xeon, 12GB RAM, 7.5TB RAID5 (SAS/10K).
Overall, we were happy with Nuix, but it was not all positive
- We were unable to process at anywhere near the marketed volume (at best, 3GB per hour)
- The software produced invalid or poorly documented exports for all review platforms tested. This meant a lot of wasted time "data massaging" on our end before we had a deliverable for attorney team
- The software had good audit of our user searching, but very poor audit of all the items Nuix (and their underlying open source indexing technology, I believe) "forgot" to index and process
- Our directors had serious concerns over the dubious ownership and dealings of the Nuix company
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HTH, RJ
Well I gave the workstation 32GB of RAM and it RAM like a dream …until I ran out of RAM again. I will say that the pagefile access is nothing like before and I am getting over 70% cpu usage with is good considering ram usage is at 99%. Normally I would only get 5-10% CPU usage when RAM is peaking out at 100%.
FYI v2.14.8 has displayed performance increases in load times and searching according to our end users.