On 16/04/2018 19:48, Terry Steichen wrote:
I have from time-to-time posted questions to this list (and received
very prompt and helpful responses). But it seems that many of you are
operating in a very different space from me. The problems (and
lessons-learned) which I encounter are often very different from those
that are reflected in exchanges with most other participants.
Hi Terry,
Sounds like a fascinating use case. We have some similar clients - small
scale law firms and publishers - who have taken advantage of Solr.
One thing I would encourage you to do is to blog and/or talk about what
you've built. Lucene Revolution is worth applying to talk at and if you
do manage to get accepted - or if you go anyway - you'll meet lots of
others with similar challenges and come away with a huge amount of
useful information and contacts. Otherwise there are lots of smaller
Meetup events (we run the London, UK one).
Don't assume just because some people here are describing their 350
billion document learning-to-rank clustered monster that the small
applications don't matter - they really do, and the fact that they're
possible to build at all is a testament to the open source model and how
we share information and tips.
Cheers
Charlie
So I thought it would be useful to describe what I'm about, and see if
there are others out there with similar implementations (or interest in
moving in that direction). A sort of pay-forward.
We (the Lakota Peoples Law Office) are a small public interest, pro bono
law firm actively engaged in defending Native American North Dakota
Water Protector clients against (ridiculously excessive) criminal charges.
I have a small Solr (6.6.0) implementation - just one shard. I'm using
the cloud mode mainly to be able to implement access controls. The
server is an ordinary (2.5GHz) laptop running Ubuntu 16.04 with 8GB of
RAM and 4 cpu processors. We presently have 8 collections with a total
of about 60,000 documents, mostly pdfs and emails. The indexed
documents are partly our own files and partly those we obtain through
legal discovery (which, surprisingly, is allowed in ND for criminal
cases). We only have a few users (our lawyers and a couple of
researchers mostly), so traffic is minimal. However, there's a premium
on precision (and recall) in searches.
The document repository is local to the server. I piggyback on the
embedded Jetty httpd in order to serve files (selected from the
hitlists). I just use a symbolic link to tie the repository to
Solr/Jetty's "webapp" subdirectory.
We provide remote access via ssh with port forwarding. It provides very
snappy performance, with fully encrypted links. Appears quite stable.
I've had some bizarre behavior apparently caused by an interaction
between repository permissions, solr permissions and the ssh link. I
seem "solved" for the moment, but time will tell for how long.
If there are any folks out there who have similar requirements, I'd be
more than happy to share the insights I've gained and problems I've
encountered and (I think) overcome. There are so many unique parts of
this small scale, specialized application (many dimensions of which are
not strictly internal to Solr) that it probably won't be appreciated to
dump them on this (excellent) Solr list. So, if you encounter problems
peculiar to this kind of setup, we can perhaps help handle them off-list
(although if they have more general Solr application, we should, of
course, post them to the list).
Terry Steichen
--
Charlie Hull
Flax - Open Source Enterprise Search
tel/fax: +44 (0)8700 118334
mobile: +44 (0)7767 825828
web: www.flax.co.uk
