@Greg - Thanks for the suggestion. Will pass it along to my folks. @Shawn - That's the link I was looking for 'non-SolrCloud approach to distributed search'. Thanks for passing that along. Will give it a try.
As far as RAM usage goes, I believe we set the heap size to about 40% of the RAM and less than 10% is available for OS caching ( since replica takes another 40%). Why does unallocated RAM help? How does it impact performance under load? -Deepak On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 2:50 PM, Shawn Heisey <s...@elyograg.org> wrote: > On 9/11/2013 2:57 PM, Deepak Konidena wrote: > >> I guess at this point in the discussion, I should probably give some more >> background on why I am doing what I am doing. Having a single Solr shard >> (multiple segments) on the same disk is posing severe performance problems >> under load,in that, calls to Solr cause a lot of connection timeouts. When >> we looked at the ganglia stats for the Solr box, we saw that while memory, >> cpu and network usage were quite normal, the i/o wait spiked. We are >> unsure >> on what caused the i/o wait and why there were no spikes in the cpu/memory >> usage. Since the Solr box is a beefy box (multi-core setup, huge ram, >> SSD), >> we'd like to distribute the segments to multiple locations (disks) and see >> whether this improves performance under load. >> >> @Greg - Thanks for clarifying that. I just learnt that I can't set them >> up >> using RAID as some of them are SSDs and some others are SATA (spinning >> disks). >> >> @Shawn Heisey - Could you elaborate more about the "broker" core and >> delegating the requests to other cores? >> > > On the broker core - I have a core on my servers that has no index of its > own. In the /select handler (and others) I have placed a shards parameter, > and many of them also have a shards.qt parameter. The shards paramter is > how a non-cloud distributed search is done. > > http://wiki.apache.org/solr/**DistributedSearch<http://wiki.apache.org/solr/DistributedSearch> > > Addressing your first paragraph: You say that you have lots of RAM ... but > is there a lot of unallocated RAM that the OS can use for caching, or is it > mostly allocated to processes, such as the java heap for Solr? > > Depending on exactly how your indexes are composed, you need up to 100% of > the total index size available as unallocated RAM. With SSD, the > requirement is less, but cannot be ignored. I personally wouldn't go below > about 25-50% even with SSD, and I'd plan on 50-100% for regular disks. > > There is some evidence to suggest that you only need unallocated RAM equal > to 10% of your index size for caching with SSD, but that is only likely to > work if you have a lot of stored (as opposed to indexed) data. If most of > your index is unstored, then more would be required. > > Thanks, > Shawn > >