Blackout 5.2 Release Notes: Performance Improvements
- Tim Randall
- 12 hours ago
- 5 min read
Empower your team to tailor Blackout for your unique needs with advanced customizations and on-the-fly prioritization that bring significant performance improvements.
Blackout 5.2 grants you full control over your agent configuration. After updating, you'll take full control over what type of work is processed by each server in your configuration. This update will also help you eliminate frustration for your teams with on-demand project re-prioritization and the long-awaited single document unlock for documents locked by production preparation.
Important Notes
Release Build Number
5.2.0.75
Announcements
None
Features
Agent and Configuration Updates
Blackout agent, configuration, and infrastructure have been significantly overhauled to promote greater flexibility and control over how and what your resources are utilized for.
Standard and High Resource Worker configurations have been removed.
Project Workers and Viewer Workers have been added.
Project Workers are responsible for processing all automated project work.
Viewer Workers are responsible for processing manual Excel, Quality Control, Find & Redact, and Suggestion work.
Project Worker and Viewer Worker configuration is tied to enabling “Advanced Configuration Mode.”
If either worker count is set to 0 while the other remains greater than 0, that type of work will be prioritized over the worker who is 0.
New agents default to a 50/50 split between Projects and Viewer activities based on the CPU count of the Agent Server (if it is an odd number, the Viewer will have an additional worker).
If the worker count exceeds the number of processor cores, a message will be displayed indicating so.
Resource pool awareness for agents has been retained.
In addition to these changes, we are modifying how manual tasks are prioritized within the Viewer Workers. Viewer Workers will always prioritize tasks that correlate to a reviewer's immediate actions when working on a document. This will result in tasks being processed in the following order:
Tasks processed first include:
Find and Redact (and any required OCR).
Spreadsheet Markup Burn-in, including manual actions, converting markups, mass action, and unhide Excel content mass action.
Clear Markup Set, including the clear markup set mass action.
Tasks checked and processed after these include:
OCR Ahead.
Suggestion Searching.
Suggestion Scheduled Tasks (Reconciliation).
Finally, these tasks are processed last:
Usage/billing-related tasks.
System log pruning.
On-the-Fly Project Prioritization
We are extremely excited to announce that the order in which projects are processed can be changed easily and without stopping the running project!
The Admin Blackout Project Status page has been updated only to display the projects running or enqueued in the Relativity instance. To start re-prioritizing projects, System Admins can click the Change Priority button and do so anytime!
Production Preparation – Unlock Individual Documents
Documents that have been locked as part of a Production Preparation project can now be unlocked and re-locked on the Excel document viewer by users who have been granted permission to do so. You can find the new permission under the Milyli Blackout permissions section named “Lock/Unlock Native Documents.”
When viewing a locked document, individuals with permission will see a new button on the Excel viewer. When clicked, the button will prompt the user with a confirmation warning and then unlock the document.
The unlocked page will display a warning letting the end user know the document is part of a production preparation project and needs to be re-locked to be properly included in production. Upon re-locking the document, the state will be updated, and the redacted extracted text will be regenerated if the project was configured to generate redacted text.
Documents in a production preparation project that are locked to the “None” markup set cannot be individually unlocked or locked. The option to unlock an individual document will not display if the production preparation fails or is stopped partway through.
Production Preparation – Download Original File
When viewing a locked document, attempting to download the native will always download the redacted version, with no way to quickly access the original. A new button, “Download Original,” has been added, which provides quick access for downloading and viewing the original, unredacted native.
Improvements
Create New Project Screen
The Create New Project modal has been updated. Spreadsheet propagation has been removed from the menu. The new modal will more easily scale with different monitor sizes and shrink and expand as we add or remove project types.
Case Level Project Queue Position
When a project is added to the queue and does not start processing immediately, additional information is displayed to help the team understand when their project will begin being processed.
This message helps teams communicate with System Administrators about whether projects should be re-prioritized. Additionally, if a project that was already processing has been moved lower in the queue, the updated queue position will be shown, along with the amount of work the project has already completed.
Improvements to Project Stopping
Projects, especially large ones, can often take a long time to complete. Occasionally, very large image projects fail to stop at all. We’ve made extensive improvements to the project tasking and queuing system, specifically to address issues with project stopping and significantly reduce the time it takes.
Simplified Project Run Status Messages
Status messages displayed when a Blackout project begins running have been simplified and clarified to better represent the system's work.
Has Blackout OCR Field
A new field has been added to indicate if the images for a given document have been OCR’d by Blackout and that the OCR data is stored in the workspace.
Migrate Project – Destination Saved Search
An optional drop-down has been added to the create migration project form to limit migrated markups to only duplicate documents that appear in the destination saved search.
Bug Fixes
Added protections to recover corrupt suggestion search indexes automatically
Fixed grammar and sorting of project type on the Blackout Projects tab.
Fixed an issue that prevented PDF markups from being migrated if the destination document also had image markups.
Fixed an issue that prevented external spreadsheet markups from being migrated to an Excel file with no markups if that file was already prepared.
Fixed an issue that prevented Analyze projects from saving when uploading a CSV with labels exceeding 30 characters.
Fixed an issue that showed Blackout agent as not licensed on startup, even when it is licensed.
Fixed an issue preventing reviewers from navigating away from an Excel Chart Sheet when clicking on a different sheet from the Markup Review Pane.
Fixed an issue preventing a Spreadsheet Project from running if the only selected option is "Redact All Comments.”
Fixed an issue resulting in a timeout when reverting markups on a spreadsheet with millions of markups.
To improve application performance, many minor changes were made to caching, indexing, and internal product logic.
Due to the nature of the Agent changes, this release included significant throughput and performance testing. This led to dozens of minor tweaks and updates to the backend of Blackout, which should result in minor improvements to the user experience when running projects or manually redacting documents.