Hi Uwe mentioned on LUCENE-3653 that there are plans to remove RAMDirectory from Trunk and move to tests only: "RAMDirectory is written for tests, not for production use. There are already plans to remove it from Lucene trunk and move to tests only." (see full comment<https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LUCENE-3653?focusedCommentId=13172338&page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel#comment-13172338> )
I wasn't aware of such plans - were there emails about it or it has been discussed on IRC? I disagree that RAMDirectory is useful only for tests. For example, when someone wants to index on Hadoop, RAMDirectory can be very useful (even though it's not the only solution). Also, RAMDirectory is still more efficient than MMapDirectory, if you want to index (and then search) on a small (sometimes even transient) amount of data. We use it in several cases for such purposes. If RAMDirectory needs to improve (for instance, allocate bigger byte[] chunks), then IMO we should do that, rather than drop it entirely from core. I think it's a very valuable Directory implementation that Lucene offers, and I'd hate to see it disappear. Shai
