On 14-May-09, at 9:46 AM, gdeconto wrote:
Solr is very fast even with 1.3 and the developers have done an
incredible
job.
However, maybe the next Solr improvement should be the creation of a
configuration manager and/or automated tuning tool. I know that
optimizing
Solr performance can be time consuming and sometimes frustrating.
"Making Solr more self-service" has been a theme we have had and
should strive to move toward. In some respects, extreme
configurability is a liability, if considerable tweaking and
experimentation is needed to achieve optimum results. You can't
expect everyone to put in the investment to develop the expertise.
That said, it is very difficult to come up with appropriate auto-
tuning heuristics that don't fail. It almost calls for a level higher
than Solr that you could hint what you want to do with the field
(sort, facet, etc.), and it makes the field definitions
appropriately. The problem with such abstractions is that they are
invariably leaky, and thus diagnosing problems requires similar
expertise as omitting the abstraction step in the first place.
Getting this trade-off right is one of the central problems of
computer science.
-Mike
