Hi Guys, We have an index/query server that contains several thousand fairly hefty indexes. Each searcher is shared between many 'user-threads' and once opened we keep the searcher in a cache which is refreshed depending on how often it is used. Due to memory limitations on the server, we need some kind of LRU mechanism to drop unused searchers to make way for newer ones. We are seeing load spikes when we get hit by queries that try to open several non-cached searches at the same (or at least a small delta) time. This looks to be the disks struggling to open all the appropriate files for that period, and it takes a little while for the server to return to normal operating limits thereafter. Given that upgrading hardware/memory is not currently an option, we need a way to smooth over these spikes, even if it is at the cost of slowing query performance overall.
It strikes me that if we could cache all of our searchers on the machine (ie have all of our indexes 'open for business'), possibly having to alter kernel parameters to cater for the large number of file handles, without caching many query results, this might solve the problem, without pushing memory usage too high. Also, the higher number of searchers stored in the heap is going to steal space from the lucene filecache so is there a recommended mechanism for doing this? So is there a way to mimimize the searcher cache memory footprint to possibly keep more of them in memory, at the cost of storing less data? Any insight would be most appreciated. ThanksClive
