dtSearch Desktop/Network system and hardware requirements

Article: dts0155

Applies to: dtSearch Desktop/Network 2024.01 and later

Operating systems supported

Supported: Windows versions 8 through 11 and Windows Server versions 2012 through 2022.

Windows RT is not supported.

Both 32-bit x86 and 64-bit versions of Windows are supported. Under 64-bit versions of Windows, the 64-bit executables are installed in the dtSearch bin64 folder.

Software dependencies

The dtSearch installer will install any required dependencies. If you are running dtSearch without installation, please see dtSearch software dependencies for information on installing the components that dtSearch requires.

Hardware requirements

dtSearch Desktop is designed for systems with a screen resolution of 1024x768 or higher.

Installation takes about 130 megabytes of hard disk space, depending on the options selected.

Additionally, you should have enough free space on the hard disk to build indexes of your documents. A dtSearch index takes about 1/3 the size of the original documents. Please see the article on Index Size for more information.

Recommended memory size is 8 Gb or more. dtSearch itself requires about 10-20 Mb of memory to search. Indexing can be done with as little as 30 Mb but more memory will result in faster performance.

Performance recommendations

1. Do not put dtSearch indexes on a compressed drive or folder. For example, do not use NTFS compression or encryption on dtSearch indexes. dtSearch indexes are internally compressed, so you will not reduce their size much, and operating system file compression can slow index access considerably. (dtSearch performance is not affected much if the documents are stored in a compressed drive or folder. It is only the indexes that should not be compressed.)

2. For best performance, use a defragmentation utility to keep your hard disk defragmented, and keep the hard disk at least 25% empty so the defragmentation utility can run efficiently.

3. Index updates will be faster and more reliable if dtSearch Desktop runs on the machine where the index is stored. It matters much less where the documents are located, because dtSearch just needs to read each document once to index it.

For more information on indexing large document collections, see Optimizing indexing of large document collections.

Windows 11 ARM

There is no dtSearch Desktop version built specifically for Windows ARM. Windows 11 on ARM can run "many" x86 and x64 Windows applications through emulation, and currently dtSearch Desktop is able to run on ARM, but this can change and we have seen an apparently working application start to return 0xC000026F in the Event Viewer ("An internal error occurred in the Win32 x86 emulation subsystem") after an update to Windows. In this case, installing updated Microsoft library components has corrected the error. These components are available from Microsoft here: Latest supported Visual C++ Redistributable downloads.

Known Limitations:

(1) Indexing Outlook messages using the "Add Outlook" button in the dtSearch Indexer does not currently work on Windows 11 ARM because the required Microsoft Office software component (MAPI) is not provided for ARM.

(2) PDF files cannot be displayed using Adobe Acrobat Reader in an embedded dtSearch Desktop window.

macOS

There is no macOS version of dtSearch Desktop, so the only option under macOS would be to run dtSearch Desktop in a virtual machine using a tool like Parallels or VMWare. An Apple Silicon (M1, M2, M3, etc.) Mac uses an ARM processor rather than an x86/x64 processor so the limitations above regarding Windows 11 ARM would apply to Windows 11 running in a virtual machine on an Apple Silicon Mac.