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This page contains information about index creation methods.

The GroupDocs.Search for .NET search index can be created and stored on disk or entirely in RAM. All changes to the on-disk index are automatically saved and available after it is loaded again. The in-memory index is faster, but uses more RAM and is completely destroyed when you finish working with it.

To create an in-memory index, you must use a constructor that does not have a path to the index folder in its parameter list. The created in-memory index can be converted to an on-disk index using the SaveTo method. This is useful when an in-memory index becomes too large and can no longer reside in RAM alone. After saving to disk, the index can then be loaded from disk as usual. Note that a regular index can be saved to disk in a different folder in the same way. Below is an example of creating an in-memory index and converting it to an on-disk index.

C#

string indexFolder = @"c:\MyIndex\";
string documentsFolder = @"c:\MyDocuments\";

// Creating an in-memory index
Index index = new Index();

// Indexing documents from the specified folder
index.Add(documentsFolder);

// Saving the index to disk
index.SaveTo(indexFolder);

// Closing the in-memory index
index.Dispose();

// Opening the index from disk
index = new Index(indexFolder);

// Searching in the index
string query = "focus";
SearchResult result = index.Search(query);

To create or load an on-disk index, you must pass the path to the index folder through the constructor parameter. The created on-disk index can be converted to an in-memory index using the LoadIntoMemoryCompletely method. After the index is completely loaded into memory, no changes to it are automatically saved to disk. You must explicitly call the SaveTo method to save any changes to the index. Below is an example of creating an on-disk index and converting it to an in-memory index.

C#

string indexFolder = @"c:\MyIndex\";
string documentsFolder = @"c:\MyDocuments\";

// Creating a regular index on disk
Index index = new Index(indexFolder);

// Indexing documents from the specified folder
index.Add(documentsFolder);

// Closing the regular index
index.Dispose();

// Loading the index entirely in memory for increased performance
Index inMemoryIndex = Index.LoadIntoMemoryCompletely(indexFolder);

// Searching in the index
string query = "focus";
SearchResult result = inMemoryIndex.Search(query);

You may easily run the code from documentation articles and see the features in action in our GitHub examples:

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