[chii]

> but which is not that realistic for many production workloads where docs are updated/added in near real-time.

it really depends on how real time you need the search to be tho.

What i've seen is a green/blue lucene index. The updates happen on one (let's say the blue), while searches happen on the other (green). The segment merging happens periodically for the blue (or even smarter, let's say, after some known amount of time and updates combined), and then the index are switched. Depending on how often new documents come in, and "real time" you need, this may be sufficient.