Tips/recommendations for using Lucene

Question

I'm working on a job portal using asp.net 3.5 I've used Lucene for job and resume search functionality. Would like to know tips/recommendations if any with respect to Lucene performance optimization, scalability, etc.

Thanks a ton!

Answer 1

One thing you should keep in mind is that it is very hard to cluster or replicate lucene indexes in large installations, like fail over scenarios or distributed systems. So you should either have a good way to replicate your index jobs or the whole database.

Answer 2

If you use a sort, watch out for the size of the comparators. When sorts are used, for each document returned by the searcher there will be a comparator object stored for each SortField in the Sort object. Depending on the size of the documents and the number of fields you want to sort on, this can become a big headache.

Answer 3

I've documented how I used Lucene.NET (in BugTracker.NET) here:

http://www.ifdefined.com/blog/post/2009/02/Full-Text-Search-in-ASPNET-using-LuceneNET.aspx