I think I'm about going the same way too. The thing is, we have few 100.000 users who are allowed to upload data which will be indexed. We're thinking of partitioning/sharding the index by user(groups).
In the beginning, I see no need for one server per shard. So we'll probably put a certain ammount of shards on one server. But as time goes by we'll reach a point where we have to migrate shards to new machine as load or shard size grows. So I see this as a scalabilty bonus. I still have to look into the servlet container / JNDI "stuff". I hope I didn't get a wrong idea, I've been on this topic for a short time only. Nico Otis wrote: >Short-circuit attempt. Why put 3 shards on a single server in the first place? If you are >working with large index and need to break it into smaller shards, break it in shards where >each shard fully utilizes the server it is on.
