Solr is a popular and robust open source enterprise search platform from Apache Lucene. Solr is Java based and runs as a standalone search server within a servlet container such as Tomcat or Jetty. It is built in the Lucene Java search library as the core, which is primarily used for full-text indexing and searching. Additionally, the Solr core consists of REST-like HTML/XML and JSON APIs, which make it virtually compatible with any programming and/or scripting language. Solr is extremely scalable, and its external configuration allows you to use it efficiently without any Java coding. Moreover, due to its extensive plugin architecture, you can even customize it as and when required.
Solr's salient features include robust full-text search, faceted search, real-time indexing, clustering, document (Word, PDF, and so on) handling, and geospatial search. Reliability, scalability, and fault tolerance capabilities make Solr even more demanding to developers, especially to SEO and DevOp professionals.
Apache Solr High Performance is a practical guide that will help you explore and take full advantage of the robust nature of Apache Solr so as to achieve optimized Solr instances, especially in terms of performance.
You will learn everything you need to know in order to achieve a high performing Solr instance or a set of instances, as well as how to troubleshoot the common problems you are prone to facing while working with a single or multiple Solr servers.
Chapter 1, Installing Solr, is basically meant for professionals who are new to Apache Solr and covers the prerequisites and steps to install it.
Chapter 2, Boost Your Search, focuses on the ways to boost your search and covers topics such as scoring, the dismax query parser, and various function queries that help in boosting.
Chapter 3, Performance Optimization, primarily emphasizes the different ways to optimize your Solr performance and covers advanced topics such as Solr caching and SolrCloud (for multiserver or distributed search).
Chapter 4, Additional Performance Optimization Techniques, extends Chapter 3, Performance Optimization, and covers additional performance optimization techniques such as fetching similar documents to those returned in the search results, searching homophones, geospatial search, and how to avoid a list of words (usually offensive words) from getting searched.
Chapter 5, Troubleshooting, focuses on how to troubleshoot the common problems, covers methods to deal with corrupted and locked indexes, thereby reducing the number of files in the index, and how to truncate the index size. It also covers the techniques to tackle issues caused due to expensive garbage collections, out-of-memory, too many open files, and infinite loop exceptions while playing around with the shards. Finally, it covers how to update a single field in all the documents without completing a full indexation activity.
Chapter 6, Performance Optimization with ZooKeeper, is an introduction to ZooKeeper and its architecture. It also covers steps to set up, configure, and deploy ZooKeeper along with the applications that use ZooKeeper to perform various activities.
Appendix, Resources, lists down the important resource URLs that help aspirants explore further and understand the topics even better. There are also links to a few related books and video tutorials that are recommended by the author.
In an intention to run most of the examples in the book, you will need a XAMPP or any other Linux-based web server, Apache Tomcat or Jetty, Java JDK (one of the latest versions), Apache Solr 4.x, and a Solr PHP client.
A couple of concepts covered in this book require additional software/tools such as the Tomcat add-on and ZooKeeper.
Apache Solr High Performance is for developers or DevOps who have hands-on experience working with Apache Solr and who are targeting to optimize Solr's performance. A basic working knowledge of Apache Lucene is desirable so that the aspirants get the most of it.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Let us start by adding the following index structure to the fields section of our schema.xml file."
A block of code is set as follows:
<field name="wm_id" type="string" indexed="true" stored="true" required="true" /><field name="wm_name" type="text" indexed="true" stored="true" termVectors="true" />
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
# http://localhost:8983/solr/select?q=sonata+string&mm=2&qf=wm_name&defType=edismax&mlt=true&mlt.fl=wm_name&mlt.mintf=1&mlt.mindf=1
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Clicking on the Next button moves you to the next screen."
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