Scalability Questions

[Guerre Bear <gu...@gmail.com>]

Hello All,

Lucene looks very interesting to me.  I was wondering if any of you could
comment on a few questions:

1) Assuming I use a typical server such as a dual-core dual-processor Dell
2950, about how many files can Lucene index and still have a sub-two-second
search speed for a simple search string such as "invoice 2005 mitsubishi"?
For the sake of argument, I figure that a typical file will have about 30KB
of text in it.

2) How many of these servers would it take to manage an index of one billion
such files?

3) Are there any HOWTO's on constructing a large Lucene search cluster?

4) Roughly how large is the index file in comparison to the size of the
input files?

5) How does Lucene's search performance/scalability compare to some of the
expensive commercial search products such as Fast?  (www.fastsearch.com)

Thank you all for any comments or suggestions!

Guerre