I recently deployed Solr to back the site search feature of a site I work on. The site itself is available in hundreds of languages. With the initial release of site search we have enabled the feature for ten of those languages. This is distributed across eight cores, with two Chinese languages plus Korean combined into one CJK core and each of the other seven languages in their own individual cores. The reason for splitting these into separate cores was so that we could have the same field names across all cores but have different configuration for analyzers, etc, per core.
Now I have some questions on this approach. 1) Scalability: Considering I need to scale this to many dozens more languages, perhaps hundreds more, is there a better way so that I don't end up needing dozens or hundreds of cores? My initial plan was that many languages that didn't have special support within Solr would simply get lumped into a single "default" core that has some default analyzers that are applicable to the majority of languages. 1b) Related to this: is there a practical limit to the number of cores that can be run on one instance of Lucene? 2) Auto Suggest: In phase two I intend to add auto-suggestions as a user types a query. In reviewing how this is implemented and how the suggestion dictionary is built I have concerns. If I have more than one language in a single core (and I keep the same field name for suggestions on all languages within a core) then it seems that I could get suggestions from another language returned with a suggest query. Is there a way to build a separate dictionary for each language, but keep these languages within the same core? If it's helpful to know: I have a field in every core for "Locale". Values will be the locale of the language of that document, i.e. "en", "es", "zh_hans", etc. I'd like to be able to: 1) when building a suggestion dictionary, divide it into multiple dictionaries, grouping them by locale, and 2) supply a parameter to the suggest query that allows the suggest component to only return suggestions from the appropriate dictionary for that locale. If the answer to #1 is "keep splitting groups of languages that have different analyzers into their own cores" and the answer to #2 is "that's not supported", then I'd be curious: where would I start to write my own extension that supported #2? I looked last night at the suggest lookup classes, dictionary classes, etc. But I didn't see a clear point where it would be clean to implement something like I'm suggesting above. Best Regards, Jeremy Thomerson
