Hi all, I have an interesting problem with my query traffic. Most of the queries run in a fairly short amount of time (< 100ms) but a few take over 1000ms. These queries are predominantly those with a huge number of hits (>1 million hits in a >100 million document index). The time taken (as far as I can tell) is for lucene to sit there while it scores and sorts all these results.
However it turns out these queries really don¹t have top results. That is, of the million documents, there are easily 10000 which are decent results (basically those above some threshold score). Frankly, just returning some consistent (so paging and reload work) but otherwise arbitrary ranking of these 10000 results would be more than good enough. It seems to me that a solution would be to impose some sort of pseudo-random filter (e.g. consider only every n-th document assuming they are uniformly distributed). I¹m wondering if anyone else has experience with this sort of issue and what solutions they have found to work well in practice. Thanks, Tim