Question

If I have a Solr core with a half-dozen small fields that’s loaded with 100 million documents, will adding a batch of 1 million documents run in a reasonable amount of time? How about 10 million? By reasonable, I’m thinking hours, rather than days. I’ve been told that this will take a long time to run. Is this really an issue? What are known strategies to improve performance? The fields are typically small, that is, 5-50 characters.

Answer 1

This is a very “tricky” question whose answer differs from schema to schema.

1. Your solr installation has a half-dozen fields. But, how many are actually indexed? If only one field is indexed, then adding 1 million documents will be faster than adding 1 million docs when 6 fields are indexed.
2. I think the type of fields that are indexed also matters. A field that is of the type “text_general” is broken down into tokens while indexing whereas a field that is of the type “string” is not. “String” type is not analyzed and is stored as one complete token.
3. I have got some very long fields which are indexed and adding 2 million docs take a few minutes (although my installation does not contain 100 million documents). So, I do not think that it will take days to add 10 million records to your installation.
4. I am not sure about this but maybe the configuration of your cpu which is running the solr instance also matters. So, you might need to see if you cpu and memory can handle this much load.

It’s upto you to decide if a long running data post is an issue or not. If your application is user intensive, then I suggest that you follow some kind of master-slave configuration so that the user is not impacted by the high cpu usage when you post the data. Some strategies which I know about improving performance is “sharding”.

http://carsabi.com/car-news/2012/03/23/step-by-step-solr-sharding/

or if it is possible to demarcate the records by some field and put those different documents onto different servers.