Solr and query abortion

[Aleksey Vorona]

Hi, we are running Solr 3.6.1 and see an issue in our load tests. Some 
of the queries our load test script produces result in huge number of 
hits. It may go as high as 90% of all documents we have (2.5M). Those 
are all range queries. I see in the log that those queries take much 
more time to execute.

Since such a query does not make any sense from the end user 
perspective, I would like to limit its performance impact.

Is it possible to abort the query after certain number of document hits 
or certain time elapsed and return a error? I would render that error as 
"Please refine your search" message to the end user in my application. I 
know that many sites on the web do that, and I guess most of them do 
that with Solr.

I tried setting timeAllowed limit, but, for some reason, I did not see 
those query times to go down. I suspect that most of the time is spent 
not in Search phase (which is the only one respecting timeAllowed, as 
far as I know), but in the sorting phase. And still, I want to abort any 
longer running query. Otherwise they accumulate over time, pushing 
server's load average sky high and killing performance even for regular 
queries.

-- Aleksey