We were using grouping (no DocValues, though) and recently switched to
using block-indexing and joins (see
https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/solr/Other+Parsers#OtherParsers-BlockJoinQueryParsers).
We got a nice speedup on average (perhaps 2x faster) and an even better
improvement in the worst times; overall the performance is much more
predictable and better, and I suspect (haven't checked) that we may be
using less heap too. The block indexing is cutting edge, a little
complicated to get right, and I had to make some custom java code to get
things just the way I wanted, but for best performance it does seem to
be the way to go.
Beware some gotchas:
You have to reindex all the docs that participate in the parent-child
relation so that each parent-child block gets indexed at once. This
might cause difficulties, but for us and I suspect most people, it's the
natural thing to do anyway.
You can only handle a single relation this way since you have to
restructure your index to use it; grouping is more flexible.
Clients may not support the new block-indexing syntax (I think SolrJ has
it, but the python client we were using did not);
Converting an existing index requires special care; you basically have
to delete all documents you are re-indexing
The Solr query parsers don't support scoring the joined-from documents
(child docs in the to-parent query, parent docs in the to-child query).
This might not matter to you, but it was important for our use case
So there are some kinks still, but if you can make it work for you, it
does seem to perform better than grouping.
-Mike
On 1/30/2015 4:10 PM, Cario, Elaine wrote:
Hi Shamik,
We use DocValues for grouping, and although I have nothing to compare it to (we
started with DocValues), we are also seeing similar poor results as you: easily
60% overhead compared to non-group queries. Looking around for some solution,
no quick fix is presenting itself unfortunately. CollapsingQParserPlugin also
is too limited for our needs.
-----Original Message-----
From: Shamik Bandopadhyay [mailto:sham...@gmail.com]
Sent: Thursday, January 15, 2015 6:02 PM
To: solr-user@lucene.apache.org
Subject: Does DocValues improve Grouping performance ?
Hi,
Does use of DocValues provide any performance improvement for Grouping ?
I' looked into the blog which mentions improving Grouping performance through
DocValues.
https://lucidworks.com/blog/fun-with-docvalues-in-solr-4-2/
Right now, Group by queries (which I can't sadly avoid) has become a huge bottleneck. It
has an overhead of 60-70% compared to the same query san group by. Unfortunately, I'm not
able to be CollapsingQParserPlugin as it doesn't have a support similar to
"group.facet" feature.
My understanding on DocValues is that it's intended for faceting and sorting.
Just wondering if anyone have tried DocValues for Grouping and saw any
improvements ?
-Thanks,
Shamik
