The javadoc for IR.maxDoc refers to “largest possible document number”, but the word “possible” is confusing. Superficially it sounds like the largest document number that Lucene can ever assign, but really it is simply the “largest document number in the index at the moment, including deleted documents.”
The javadoc should probably simply say: numDocs = maxDocs - numDeletedDocs -- Jack Krupansky From: Uwe Schindler Sent: Sunday, June 03, 2012 3:47 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: What is the maximum document number? Hi, In fact maxDoc is not the maximum, it is also a count. If no deletions are in an index, maxDoc==numDocs. That's unfortunately how it is, maybe we should rename that in 4.0. Uwe -- Uwe Schindler H.-H.-Meier-Allee 63, 28213 Bremen http://www.thetaphi.de Jack Krupansky <[email protected]> schrieb: Doing a little more research on document numbers, I had thought that the maximum document number was 2^30-1 or Integer.MAX_INT, but... I see that IndexReader.numDocs, maxDoc, and the corresponding IndexWriter methods return the number of documents as an int, so since document numbers start at zero, the number of documents is actually limited to 2^30-1, so the highest document number is limited to 2^30-1 minus another 1 or 2^30-2. -- Jack Krupansky
