Sifter utility
The sifter assigns mentors to users and updates its assignments as users rate items. When no users are rating items, the sifter updates the mentor assignments of all users based on changes to the pool of available mentors.
The sifter must be running whenever the LikeMinds server is running. However, you can install the sifter across multiple machines to distribute load.
Sifter performance considerations
The sifter places high processing demands on the system running it. For this reason it is important to tune it with consideration of its usage and environment. Use the following simple guidelines when tuning the sifter:
- Schedule the sifter to build the mentor pools during hours of the day when there is low traffic volume, for example, at 3 a.m.
- Tune the number of processing threads used by the process.
Sifter configuration
You can specify the following categories of sifter-specific configuration parameters for mentor sets:
- Time interval for checking the sift priority
- Number of sift priority users per batch
- Maximum number of mentors assigned to each user
- Minimum transactions a user must have before becoming a mentor
- The mentor pool size
- Rebuilding the mentor pool
- Pausing the sifter during periods of heavy database usage
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