[falcolas]

Our company had to set up a Solr implementation with some pretty crazy requirements (hundreds of shards, tens of thousands of requests per second, etc), and we ended up with 4 machines - one for indexing, one as a backup indexer/searcher, and 2 just doing load balanced searches. Replication was interesting but easy to set up (since it's basically an rsync of the indexes between servers).

The end result works very well, though it's a real memory hog when you get into the "hundreds" of shards on an individual server.

[raccoonone]

What was the reason for having hundreds of shards on each server? Were you still seeing performance benefits to sharding it that aggresively?

[falcolas]

Multi-tennent data separation required by contract.