Best practices for search performance

In Office SharePoint Server 2007, you also have SharePoint groups. This system is very flexible and can include multiple layers of nesting. However, security principals can adversely affect Office SharePoint Server search performance.


To ensure maximum performance from the Office SharePoint Server 2007 crawler and searches, observe the following rules when you are using Active Directory security principals and SharePoint groups:

Place user accounts into global groups, and global groups into domain local groups. Assign permissions to domain local groups. This is the recommended best practice for using security principals in Active Directory. It ensures that domain controllers can look up group memberships quickly and that users can access resources throughout the forest.

If universal groups are necessary, use the same system but put global groups into universal groups and universal groups into domain local groups.

Put domain local groups into SharePoint groups to assign permissions to SharePoint sites and other resources.


Limit the number of nesting levels used in group membership.

• Do not Assign Office SharePoint Server site permissions to individual users.
• Do not Use deeply nested Active Directory security groups.
• Do not Use distribution lists or security groups that contain contacts.

For more details -

Search Performance