This talk was given during Lucene Revolution 2017 and has two goals: first, to discuss the tradeoffs for running Solr on Docker. For example, you get dynamic allocation of operating system caches, but you also get some CPU overhead. We'll keep in mind that Solr nodes tend to be different than your average container: Solr is usually long running, takes quite some RSS and a lot of virtual memory. This will imply, for example, that it makes more sense to use Docker on big physical boxes than on configurable-size VMs (like Amazon EC2).

They say optimize is bad for you, they say you shouldn't do it, they say it will invalidate operating system caches and make your system suffer. This is all true, but is it true in all cases? In this presentation we will look closer on what optimize or better called force merge does to your Solr search engine. You will learn what segments are, how they are built and how they are used by Lucene and Solr for searching.