I'm trying to determine the overhead of adding some pseudo fields to one of our standard searches. The pseudo fields are simply function queries to report if certain fields matched the query or not. I had thought that I could run the search without the change and then re-run the searches with the fields added. I had assumed that the QTime in the query response would be a good metric to use when comparing the performance of the two search queries. However I see that the QTime for a query can vary by more than 10%. When testing I cleared the query cache between tests. Usually the QTime would be within a few milliseconds of each other, however in some cases there was a 10X or more difference between them. Even cached queries vary in their QTime, though much less.
I am running Solr 7.7.2 in a solrcloud configuration with 2 shards and 2 replicas/shard. Our nodes have 32Gb memory and 16GB of heap allocated to solr. I am concerned that these discrepancies indicate that our system is not tuned well enough. Should I expect that a query's QTime really is a measure of the query's inherent performance? Is there a better way to measure query performance? This message and any attachment are confidential and may be privileged or otherwise protected from disclosure. If you are not the intended recipient, you must not copy this message or attachment or disclose the contents to any other person. If you have received this transmission in error, please notify the sender immediately and delete the message and any attachment from your system. Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany and any of its subsidiaries do not accept liability for any omissions or errors in this message which may arise as a result of E-Mail-transmission or for damages resulting from any unauthorized changes of the content of this message and any attachment thereto. Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany and any of its subsidiaries do not guarantee that this message is free of viruses and does not accept liability for any damages caused by any virus transmitted therewith. Click http://www.merckgroup.com/disclaimer to access the German, French, Spanish and Portuguese versions of this disclaimer.