We are developing a search engine web application that will enable users to search the content of about 200 portals.
Our business partner is taking care of maintaining and feeding a solr/lucene instance that is doing the workhorse job of indexing the data.
Our application queries solr and presents the results in a human-friendly way. However, we are wondering how we could limit the amount of queries, perhaps using some form of caching. The results could be cached for few hours.
What we are wondering is: what could be a good strategy for caching the queries results? Obviously we expect the method invocations to vary a lot… Does it make sense at all to do caching?
Is there some caching system that is particularly suitable in this use case? We are using Spring 3 for the development.
I would keep in mind that Solr already has a lot of caching built into it in order to speed up common queries. I’d advise you to look into the inherent capabilities in Solr/Lucene before you go off and reinvent the wheel with your own query cache.
Here is a good place to start.