Recommendations for managing very large workspaces in RelativityOne

The management of very large and complex workspaces requires an advanced level of knowledge and expertise as these workspaces generally bring a new set of challenges and potential complications. As an administrator, you should know the best approach for identifying and addressing performance and workflow complications that may arise when managing these workspaces in RelativityOne.

A workspace may be very large or complex because of either of the following conditions:

  • Number of users—This relates to the total concurrent active users in a single workspace. Having concurrent user activity in excess of 200 users in any single workspace in RelativityOne can create resource contention during certain workflow activities. This situation where an influx of users affects the resources in a workspace can happen suddenly.

  • Document count—a database is considered large if it is expected to reach more than 5 million documents. Very large workspaces may contain more than 15 million document records. Other projects that would be considered complex include second requests, short timelines, large migrations or imports to RelativityOne, and other unique circumstances.

Below are best practices and considerations for the management of workspaces that meet these conditions, including guidance on the self-management of workflows and when to contact Relativity for assistance.

Identifying a need to scale and RelativityOne’s automated response

Any workspace can be overwhelmed by excessive queries, search index builds, overly complex searches, or having too many users logged in. When these workflows are performed in very large or complex workspaces, however, minor issues can be compounded, and resources are put under stress, causing actions to take minutes instead of seconds. The following issues may impact a workspace unnecessarily or cause poor responsiveness:

  • Adding and removing fields.

  • Overall slowness caused by too many fields being used within the document object.

  • Trying to complete excessively complex searches.

  • Having a large number of folders.

  • Mass edits or coding a significant number of documents within a workspace.

  • Direct SQL user actions or on a database server.

We recommend that your organization becomes familiar with workflow recommendations for very large workspaces and implement them as soon as possible to minimize resource contention and performance impacts. For more information on best practices, please visit Workflow solutions for very large workspaces.

Proactive Monitoring of RelativityOne Environments

Site Reliability Engineering and product engineering teams provide proactive monitoring, oversight and response to ensure the overall health of RelativityOne environments. Active alerts provide feedback on capacity, duration and errors of the features and cloud infrastructure that support RelativityOne. When these metrics exceed expected levels, RelativityOne teams partner together to actively respond, investigate, and restore health to RelativityOne components.

In addition to feature and infrastructure monitoring, critical workflows, such as review, are measured for availability and performance to provide a consistent RelativityOne experience.

When critical workflow levels are exceeded and identified due to very large workspace considerations, RelativityOne teams respond through automated and bespoke actions which may involve resource isolation, database optimization, and other best practice approaches developed internally by our experts.

Contacting RelativityOne in advance for upcoming large and complex projects

In addition to the automatic measures within RelativityOne to react to unexpected increases in resource utilization due to very large workspace conditions, customers should proactively notify Relativity of incoming very large and/or complex projects.

To contact Relativity and request a project scoping call and proactive capacity review, visit the Incoming Project Details: RelativityOne form available on the Community site. When submitting the request, information regarding expected size, specific workflows of interest, and expected number of concurrent reviewers should be provided to ensure we have the necessary information by which to consult, address, and make recommendations for an optimal experience in RelativityOne. Proactive partnership is key to the ongoing success of these workspaces.