[question] speed

[Traut <tr...@gmail.com>]

Hi all

    I'm working on some presentation for my co-workers about Lucene/Solr 
index/search process. The question is why lucene (especially Solr) is 
such a fast engine?

Has it something to do with index file formats 
(http://lucene.apache.org/java/docs/fileformats.html)?

or is it all about using reverse indexing strategy?

I'm have been digging into Lucene/Solr for nearly three month but only 
as an advanced user so I am not familiar with the details of engine 
implementation

thank you

Traut

Re: [question] speed

[Yonik Seeley <yo...@apache.org>]

On 4/22/07, Traut <tr...@gmail.com> wrote:
>     I'm working on some presentation for my co-workers about Lucene/Solr
> index/search process. The question is why lucene (especially Solr) is
> such a fast engine?

I think some of it is the nature of open source.  You have people who
care, contributing patches to make things faster.   There's no such
thing as "well this meets requirements, now lets move on to the next
feature checkbox".

> Has it something to do with index file formats
> (http://lucene.apache.org/java/docs/fileformats.html)?

That's certainly the foundation.  The scorers above that need to be fast too.

> or is it all about using reverse indexing strategy?

AFAIK, full-text search products generally use an inverted index.

So Solr is fast because Lucene is fast (and getting faster).  Solr
also adds a lot of smart configurable caching, and very fast set
implementations that speed up filtering and faceting.

-Yonik