Against my better judgment, the
company I work for migrated our
previous search solution to
Zend_Search_Lucene. On pretty
heavy-duty hardware, indexing a
million documents took several hours,
and searches were relatively slow. The
indexing process consumed vast amounts
of memory, and the indexes frequently
became corrupted (using 1.5.2). A
single wild card search literally
brought the web server to its knees,
so we disabled that feature. Memory
usage was very high for searches, and
as a result requests per second
necessarily declined heavily as we had
to reduce the number of Apache child
processes.
We have since moved to Solr (a
Lucene-based Java search server) and
the difference is dramatic. Indexing
now takes around 10 minutes and
searches are lightning fast. What a
difference a language makes.