[ 
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LUCENE-1458?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=12648727#action_12648727
 ] 

Marvin Humphrey commented on LUCENE-1458:
-----------------------------------------

The work on streamlining the term dictionary is excellent, but perhaps we can 
do better still.  Can we design a format that allows us rely upon the operating 
system's virtual memory and avoid caching in process memory altogether?  

Say that we break up the index file into fixed-width blocks of 1024 bytes.  
Most blocks would start with a complete term/pointer pairing, though at the top 
of each block, we'd need a status byte indicating whether the block contains a 
continuation from the previous block in order to handle cases where term length 
exceeds the block size.  

For Lucy/KinoSearch our plan would be to mmap() on the file, but accessing it 
as a stream would work, too.  Seeking around the index term dictionary would 
involve seeking the stream to multiples of the block size and performing binary 
search, rather than performing binary search on an array of cached terms.  
There would be increased processor overhead; my guess is that since the second 
stage of a term dictionary seek -- scanning through the primary term dictionary 
-- involves comparatively more processor power than this, the increased costs 
would be acceptable.

Advantages:

* Multiple forks can all share the same system buffer, reducing per-process 
memory footprint.
* The cost to read in the index term dictionary during IndexReader startup 
drops to zero.
* The OS caches for the index term dictionaries can either be allowed to warm 
naturally, or can be nudged into virtual memory via e.g. "cat 
/path/to/index/*.tis > /dev/null".

> Further steps towards flexible indexing
> ---------------------------------------
>
>                 Key: LUCENE-1458
>                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LUCENE-1458
>             Project: Lucene - Java
>          Issue Type: New Feature
>          Components: Index
>    Affects Versions: 2.9
>            Reporter: Michael McCandless
>            Assignee: Michael McCandless
>            Priority: Minor
>             Fix For: 2.9
>
>         Attachments: LUCENE-1458.patch, LUCENE-1458.patch
>
>
> I attached a very rough checkpoint of my current patch, to get early
> feedback.  All tests pass, though back compat tests don't pass due to
> changes to package-private APIs plus certain bugs in tests that
> happened to work (eg call TermPostions.nextPosition() too many times,
> which the new API asserts against).
> [Aside: I think, when we commit changes to package-private APIs such
> that back-compat tests don't pass, we could go back, make a branch on
> the back-compat tag, commit changes to the tests to use the new
> package private APIs on that branch, then fix nightly build to use the
> tip of that branch?o]
> There's still plenty to do before this is committable! This is a
> rather large change:
>   * Switches to a new more efficient terms dict format.  This still
>     uses tii/tis files, but the tii only stores term & long offset
>     (not a TermInfo).  At seek points, tis encodes term & freq/prox
>     offsets absolutely instead of with deltas delta.  Also, tis/tii
>     are structured by field, so we don't have to record field number
>     in every term.
> .
>     On first 1 M docs of Wikipedia, tii file is 36% smaller (0.99 MB
>     -> 0.64 MB) and tis file is 9% smaller (75.5 MB -> 68.5 MB).
> .
>     RAM usage when loading terms dict index is significantly less
>     since we only load an array of offsets and an array of String (no
>     more TermInfo array).  It should be faster to init too.
> .
>     This part is basically done.
>   * Introduces modular reader codec that strongly decouples terms dict
>     from docs/positions readers.  EG there is no more TermInfo used
>     when reading the new format.
> .
>     There's nice symmetry now between reading & writing in the codec
>     chain -- the current docs/prox format is captured in:
> {code}
> FormatPostingsTermsDictWriter/Reader
> FormatPostingsDocsWriter/Reader (.frq file) and
> FormatPostingsPositionsWriter/Reader (.prx file).
> {code}
>     This part is basically done.
>   * Introduces a new "flex" API for iterating through the fields,
>     terms, docs and positions:
> {code}
> FieldProducer -> TermsEnum -> DocsEnum -> PostingsEnum
> {code}
>     This replaces TermEnum/Docs/Positions.  SegmentReader emulates the
>     old API on top of the new API to keep back-compat.
>     
> Next steps:
>   * Plug in new codecs (pulsing, pfor) to exercise the modularity /
>     fix any hidden assumptions.
>   * Expose new API out of IndexReader, deprecate old API but emulate
>     old API on top of new one, switch all core/contrib users to the
>     new API.
>   * Maybe switch to AttributeSources as the base class for TermsEnum,
>     DocsEnum, PostingsEnum -- this would give readers API flexibility
>     (not just index-file-format flexibility).  EG if someone wanted
>     to store payload at the term-doc level instead of
>     term-doc-position level, you could just add a new attribute.
>   * Test performance & iterate.

-- 
This message is automatically generated by JIRA.
-
You can reply to this email to add a comment to the issue online.


---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Reply via email to