1) Do I need to be closing and reopening those client readers in order to see deletes from the indexing server?
yes, lucene take an snapshot of the directory and don't see changes maded after is opened
2) Is it cheap to continually reopen the readers, or should I do it periodically somehow?
it's not cheap, so you have to reopen periodically, an for better performance launch somo queries for warm the caches
3) Do I need to be taking some other approach on the indexing server to be smarter about deletes/updates?
in our case, we have 3 index servers, and we send the updates to the three, so all of them work in parallel and i don't have to worry about copyng files. this is another approach tha you can use if the number of search servers is small. -- Jokin
Thanks. --Max
