On 12/30/2014 5:43 AM, Toke Eskildsen wrote: > Shawn Heisey [apa...@elyograg.org] wrote: >> I believe it would be useful to organize a session at Lucene Revolution, >> possibly more interactive than a straight presentation, where users with >> very large indexes are encouraged to attend. The point of this session >> would be to exchange war stories, configuration requirements, hardware >> requirements, and observations. > > From the perspective of the conference it might tie up a lot of time: If we > were to get down to the configuration level, one session would not be enough. > Some sort of pre-conference bar camp might do it? Or maybe even a whole > pre-conference day? > > (side-note to the side-note: Living in Europe, going to Lucene/Solr > Revolution means spending more time on travel than the actual conference - > extending the activities to 3 days would increase the odds of me going next > year)
I've had the same problem with my desires to attend conventions. Even the ones that happen on my home continent (US) have extreme travel expenses. I may be able to attend ApacheCon this year, because I know someone who lives in the hosting city. It could indeed tie up a lot of time ... but for those who are dealing with large indexes and those interested in the topic, I bet they would be willing to dedicate that time. I acknowledge that the whole idea as I have envisioned it might be unworkable, too. >> Better documentation for extreme scaling is also a possible outcome. > > I did at some point try to write a long blog entry on Solr hardware and setup > for non-small corpuses, but have to give up: There were just too many "but if > you need to scale X, you might be better off by choosing Y, unless your usage > is Z". I think multiple detailed descriptions of setups is a great starting > point. If we get enough of them, some pattern will hopefully emerge, although > I am afraid that the pattern will be "to get this to work, we had to write > custom code". Even with all the caveats, a blog post like that might still be useful. I can understand why you gave up ... different people will need scalability in different ways, and unless you have direct experience with all aspects, the resulting documentation or blog post would contain much speculation ... and even the non-speculation parts probably would only be correct for a subset of users. You could be right about it coming down to custom code ... although if that code is really useful, it could be donated and incorporated into the project. >> Another idea, not sure if it would be good as an alternate idea or >> supplemental, is a less formal gathering, perhaps over a meal or three. > > Outside of Lucene/Solr Revolution? How would that work geographically? I was thinking about this happening at or concurrently with LR, but now that you have raised the possibility, a completely separate formal or informal gathering does sound like a really good idea. I don't know how it would get organized or who would sponsor it, though. I'd like to discuss it folks from LucidWorks and others who have experience with events. I might not be able to attend something like that, but as much as I would like to go, I am not really part of the main audience. If there is sufficient interest, we could do a small-scale electronic version of this gathering at any time ... either via email or at pre-determined time on IRC. Thanks, Shawn
