My documents have a down_vote field. Every time a user votes down a document,
I increment the down_vote field in my database and also re-index the document
to Solr to reflect the new down_vote value.
During searches, I want to restrict the results to only documents with, say
fewer than 3
From the user perspective I wouldn't delete it, because it could be
that down-voting by mistake or spam or something and up-voting can
resurrect it.
It could be also wise to keep the docs to see which content (from which
users?) are down voted to get spam accounts?
From the dev perspective
Just deleting a document is faster because all that really happens
is the document is marked as deleted. An update is really
a delete followed by an add of the same document, so by definition
an update will be slower...
But... does it really make a difference? How often to you expect this to
The actual time it takes to delete or update the document is unlikely to
make a difference to you.
What might make a difference to you is the time it takes to actually
finalize the commit, and the time it takes to re-warm your indexes after
a commit, and especially the time it takes to run
