All About Programming: The Seven Deadly Sins of Solr

Refusal to add the proper amount of RAM to a server. There have been occasions when I've had more RAM on my Mac laptop (4GB) than some of the production Solr implementations I've seen. Sometimes even Solr projects at large companies have been under-funded. There will be business requirements that make high memory demands (sorting on large String fields, lots of faceting on fields with huge numbers of distinct terms, etc.) but the expectation will be that this can somehow be "made to work" with an insufficient amount of RAM and some kind of wizardry. A friend of mine has a saying, "You can't fit 15 pounds of rice into a 10 pound bag." By all means commit to at least acquiring the minimum adequate amount of resources.
Insisting on running indexing and searching on the same host. One of the first recommendations we at Lucidworks often make to customers is to separate the indexing and searching process to (at least) two separate nodes. There are several benefits to be gained by doing this. First, the indexing and searching processes are not competing for resources (cpu, memory, etc.). Second, nodes can be configured slightly differently for optimum performance. Be sure to budget for adequate hardware based on your document count, index size, and expected query volume.

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