Thanks to you all for those informed advices. Thanks Trey for your very detailed point of view. This is now very clear to me how a search on multiple fields can grow slower than a search on a catchall field.
Our actual search model is problematic: we search on a catchall field, but need to know which fields match, so we do highlighting on multi fields (not indexed, but stored). To improve performance, we want to get rid of highlighting and use the solr explain output. To get the explain output on those fields, we need to do a search on those fields. So I guess we have to test if removing highlighting and adding multi fields search will improve performances or not. Best regards, Elisabeth 2015-10-12 17:55 GMT+02:00 Jack Krupansky <jack.krupan...@gmail.com>: > I think it may all depend on the nature of your application and how much > commonality there is between fields. > > One interesting area is auto-suggest, where you can certainly suggest from > the union of all fields, you may want to give priority to suggestions from > preferred fields. For example, for actual product names or important > keywords rather than random words from the English language that happen to > occur in descriptions, all of which would occur in a catchall. > > -- Jack Krupansky > > On Mon, Oct 12, 2015 at 8:39 AM, elisabeth benoit < > elisaelisael...@gmail.com > > wrote: > > > Hello, > > > > We're using solr 4.10 and storing all data in a catchall field. It seems > to > > me that one good reason for using a catchall field is when using scoring > > with idf (with idf, a word might not have same score in all fields). We > got > > rid of idf and are now considering using multiple fields. I remember > > reading somewhere that using a catchall field might speed up searching > > time. I was wondering if some of you have any opinion (or experience) > > related to this subject. > > > > Best regards, > > Elisabeth > > >
