: How do I determine how many tiers it has? You may find this blog post from mccandless helpful...
http://blog.mikemccandless.com/2011/02/visualizing-lucenes-segment-merges.html (don't ignore the videos! watching them really helpful to understand what he is talking about) Once you've obsorbed that, then please revist your question, specifically Upayavira's key point: what is the problem you are trying to solve? https://people.apache.org/~hossman/#xyproblem XY Problem Your question appears to be an "XY Problem" ... that is: you are dealing with "X", you are assuming "Y" will help you, and you are asking about "Y" without giving more details about the "X" so that we can understand the full issue. Perhaps the best solution doesn't involve "Y" at all? See Also: http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=542341 -Hoss
