Hello dear user list! I work at a company in retail where we use solr to perform searches as you type. As soon as you type more than 1 characters in the search field solr starts serving hits. Of course this generates a lot of "unnecessary" queries (in the sense that they are never shown to the user) which is why I started thinking about using something like squid or varnish to cache a bunch of these 2-4 character queries.
It seems most stuff I find about it is from pretty old sources, but as far as I know solrcloud doesn't have distributed cache support. Our indexes aren't updated that frequently, about 4 - 6 times a day. We don't use a lot of shards and replicas (biggest index is split to 3 shards with 2 replicas). All shards/replicas are not on the same solr host. Our solr setup handles around 80-200 queries per second during the day with peaks at >1500 before holiday season and sales. I haven't really read up on the details yet but it seems like I could use etags and Expires headers to work around having to do some of that "unnecessary" work. Is anyone doing this? Why? Why not? - peace!
