Frequency of Full reindex on SolrCloud - solr

How often do I need to run full reindex on SolrCloud?
It takes more than 12 hours for full reindex to run and we run it every night but is it really necessary to do it as delta runs correctly.
New data comes in at the rate of 2000 documents on every delta per 30 seconds.
Total index size : 20GB
Solr: 6.5.2

If delta runs correctly, there should be no need to run a reindex at all. The exception might be if you do not have disabled any merging while the index is operative; in that case you might end up with a very fragmented index file wise, and the reindex ends up building a complete set as a single index file instead, but isn't usually how Solr is configured, and if it is - it's done for a reason.
So - if your delta is working correctly and you run Solr with fairly standard settings, you can safely skip reindexing unless you're starting over with an empty index (or have a situation where the schema has changed). But be sure that this also includes deletions - a reindex would probably not include deleted elements, so the question then becomes whether your delta import handles deletions as well.
None of our Solr based services reindex at all - everything is done with live updates and a decent merge factor.

Related

Update SOLR document without adding deleted documents

I'm running a lot of SOLR document updates which results in 100s of thousands of deleted documents and a significant increase in disk usage (100s of Gb).
I'm able to remove all deleted document by doing an optimize
curl http://localhost:8983/solr/core_name/update?optimize=true
But this takes hours to run and requires a lot of RAM and disk space.
Is there a better way to remove deleted documents from the SOLR index or to update a document without creating a deleted one?
Thanks for your help!
Lucene uses an append only strategy, which means that when a new version of an old document is added, the old document is marked as deleted, and a new one is inserted into the index. This way allows Lucene to avoid rewriting the whole index file as documents are added, at the cost of old documents physically still being present in the index - until a merge or an optimize happens.
When you issue expungeDeletes, you're telling Solr to perform a merge if the number of deleted documents exceed a certain threshold, in effect, meaning that you're forcing an optimize behind the scenes as Solr deems necessary.
How you can work around this depends on more specific information about your use case - in the general case just leaving it to the standard settings for merge factors etc. should be good enough. If you're not seeing any merges, you might have disabled automatic merges from taking place (depending on your index size and seeing hundred of thousands of deleted documents seems extensive for an indexing processing taking 2m30s). In that case make sure to enable it properly and tweak it values again. There's also changes that were introduced with 7.5 to the TieredMergePolicy that allows even more detailed control (and possibly better defaults) for the merge process.
If you're re-indexing your complete dataset each time, indexing to a separate collection/core and then switching an alias over or renaming the core when finished before removing the old dataset is also an option.

When to optimize a Solr Index [duplicate]

I have a classifieds website. Users may put ads, edit ads, view ads etc.
Whenever a user puts an ad, I am adding a document to Solr.
I don't know, however, when to commit it. Commit slows things down from what I have read.
How should I do it? Autocommit every 12 hours or so?
Also, how should I do it with optimize?
A little more detail on Commit/Optimize:
Commit: When you are indexing documents to solr none of the changes you are making will appear until you run the commit command. So timing when to run the commit command really depends on the speed at which you want the changes to appear on your site through the search engine. However it is a heavy operation and so should be done in batches not after every update.
Optimize: This is similar to a defrag command on a hard drive. It will reorganize the index into segments (increasing search speed) and remove any deleted (replaced) documents. Solr is a read only data store so every time you index a document it will mark the old document as deleted and then create a brand new document to replace the deleted one. Optimize will remove these deleted documents. You can see the search document vs. deleted document count by going to the Solr Statistics page and looking at the numDocs vs. maxDocs numbers. The difference between the two numbers is the amount of deleted (non-search able) documents in the index.
Also Optimize builds a whole NEW index from the old one and then switches to the new index when complete. Therefore the command requires double the space to perform the action. So you will need to make sure that the size of your index does not exceed %50 of your available hard drive space. (This is a rule of thumb, it usually needs less then %50 because of deleted documents)
Index Server / Search Server:
Paul Brown was right in that the best design for solr is to have a server dedicated and tuned to indexing, and then replicate the changes to the searching servers. You can tune the index server to have multiple index end points.
eg: http://solrindex01/index1; http://solrindex01/index2
And since the index server is not searching for content you can have it set up with different memory footprints and index warming commands etc.
Hope this is useful info for everyone.
Actually, committing often and optimizing makes things really slow. It's too heavy.
After a day of searching and reading stuff, I found out this:
1- Optimize causes the index to double in size while beeing optimized, and makes things really slow.
2- Committing after each add is NOT a good idea, it's better to commit a couple of times a day, and then make an optimize only once a day at most.
3- Commit should be set to "autoCommit" in the solrconfig.xml file, and there it should be tuned according to your needs.
The way that this sort of thing is usually done is to perform commit/optimize operations on a Solr node located out of the request path for your users. This requires additional hardware, but it ensures that the performance penalty of the indexing operations doesn't impact your users. Replication is used to periodically shuttle optimized index files from the master node to the nodes that perform search queries for users.
Try it first. It would be really bad if you avoided a simple and elegant solution just because you read that it might cause a performance problem. In other words, avoid premature optimization.

How to configure Solr for improved indexing speed

I have a client program which generates a 1-50 millions Solr documents and add them to Solr.
I'm using ConcurrentUpdateSolrServer for pushing the documents from the client, 1000 documents per request.
The documents are relatively small (few small text fields).
I want to improve the indexing speed.
I've tried to increase the "ramBufferSizeMB" to 1G and the "mergeFactor" to 25 but didn't see any change.
I was wondering if there is some other recommended settings for improving Solr indexing speed.
Any links to relevant materials will be appreciated.
It looks like you are doing a bulk import of data into Solr, so you don't need to search any data right away.
First, you can increase the number of documents per request. Since your documents are small, I would even increase it to 100K docs per request or more and try.
Second, you want to reduce the number of times commits happen when you are bulk indexing. In your solrconfig.xml look for:
<!-- AutoCommit
Perform a hard commit automatically under certain conditions.
Instead of enabling autoCommit, consider using "commitWithin"
when adding documents.
http://wiki.apache.org/solr/UpdateXmlMessages
maxDocs - Maximum number of documents to add since the last
commit before automatically triggering a new commit.
maxTime - Maximum amount of time in ms that is allowed to pass
since a document was added before automatically
triggering a new commit.
openSearcher - if false, the commit causes recent index changes
to be flushed to stable storage, but does not cause a new
searcher to be opened to make those changes visible.
-->
<autoCommit>
<maxTime>15000</maxTime>
<openSearcher>false</openSearcher>
</autoCommit>
You can disable autoCommit altogether and then call a commit after all your documents are posted. Otherwise you can tweak the numbers as follows:
The default maxTime is 15 secs so an auto commit happens every 15 secs if there are uncommitted docs, so you can set this to something large, say 3 hours (i.e. 3*60*60*1000). You can also add <maxDocs>50000000</maxDocs> which means an auto commit happens only after 50 million documents are added. After you post all your documents, call commit once manually or from SolrJ - it will take a while to commit, but this will be much faster overall.
Also after you are done with your bulk import, reduce maxTime and maxDocs, so that any incremental posts you will do to Solr will get committed much sooner. Or use commitWithin as mentioned in solrconfig.
In addition to what was written above, when using SolrCloud, you may want to consider using the CloudSolrClient when using SolrJ. The CloudSolrClient client class is Zookeeper aware and is able to directly connect to the leader shard speeding up the indexing in some cases.

Solr performance according to query frequency

I send query to solr per 10mins (fig.1), you can see many of "invoke time" are greater than 1000ms (the "len" indicates result length form solr, every window corresponding to a server).
However, if I change query frequency - send query per 10s (fig.2), nearly all "invoke time" reduce to 10ms. Am I miss any config in solrconfig? (solr version - 3.6, all config retain its default value).
Check for the Solr Caching configuration in the solrconfig.xml file.
The Cache usually has a max size. If the max size is exceeded would make way for the New ones by removing the old and least recently used ones.
Probably, when you fire Query every 10s the result is always available in Cache and hence fetched by Solr within 10ms.
However, when you fire a query every 10mins the Cache probably has lost the entry and has to re-fetch it again, provided you have lot of queries or the cache is invalidated within that time frame.
Check for the Cache statistics on the Solr admin page and fine the Cache settings/

solr indexing strategy

We have millions of documents in mongo we are looking to index on solr. Obviously when we do this the first time we need to index all the documents.
But after that, we should only need to index the documents as they change. What is the best way to do this? Should we call addDocument and then in cron call commit()? What does addDocument vs commit vs optimize do (I am using Apache_Solr_Service)
If you're using Solr 3.x you can forget the optimize, which merges all segments into one big segment. The commit makes changes visible to new IndexReaders; it's expensive, I wouldn't call it for each document you add. Instead of calling it through a cron, I'd use the autocommit in solrconfig.xml. You can tune the value depending on how much time you can wait to get new documents while searching.
The document won't actually be added to the index until you do commit() - it could be rolled back. optimize() will (ostensibly; I've not had particularly good luck with it) reduce the size of the index (documents that have been deleted still take up room unless the index is optimized).
If you set autocommit for your database, then you can be sure that any documents added to the database via update, have been committed, when the autocommit interval has passed. I have used a 5-minute interval and it works fine even when a few thousand updates happen within the 5 minutes. After a full reindex is complete, I wait 5 minutes and then tell people that it is done. In fact, when people ask how quickly updates get into the db, I will tell them that we poll for changes every minute, but that there are variables (such as a sudden big batch) and it is best to not expect things to be updated for 5 or 6 minutes. So far, nobody has really claimed a business need to have it update faster than that.
This is with a 350,000 record db totalling roughly 10G in RAM.

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