multicore vs. multiple instances

[Jeremy Hinegardner <je...@hinegardner.org>]

I'm sitting here looking over some ideas and one thing just occurred to
me, what would be the benefits of using a MultiCore approache for
sharding vs.  multiple instances of solr?

That is, say I wanted to have 3 shards on a single piece of hardware,
what would be the advantages / disadvantages of using 1 instance of Solr
with 3 cores, vs 3 instances of Solr. In the latter case, with the
additional thought of each in its own servlet container, or each as a
different webapp inside a single servlet container.

A few comparison I can think of right now are:

  * 1 JVM in multicore vs. 3 in multi-instances, with 3 servlet
    containers
  * future possibility of dynamically allocating and loading of
    additional cores in multicore 
  * snapshotting with MultiCore?  I'm assuming that will just work, but
    I haven't tested it yet.
  * configuration may be the easiest and most maintainable with multicore ?

Any other thoughts people have on the subject?  What considerations
would you use to decide between multicore vs. multiple instances ? 

enjoy,

-jeremy

-- 
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 Jeremy Hinegardner                              jeremy@hinegardner.org