As mentioned TooManyClauses has nothing to do with the number of results returned, and everything to do with the way the number of terms in "rewritten" query. these exceptions are a kind of safety net in the Lucene internals to prevent the entire application from crashing with an OOM exception on input that is "too vague"
Three is a solrconfig.xml option for adjusting what the limit of this safety net is. : 1024 org.apache.lucene.search.BooleanQuery$TooManyClauses" when I do a : query that essentially amounts to asking for q=* q=* isn't legal syntax ... can you be a little more specific about what type of query you are trying to execute? As far as i can remember, starting with Solr 1.3, no input to any of the built in query parsers should be able to trigger a TooManyClauses (since WildcardQueries now rewrite to a Filter just like prefix and range queries) -Hoss
