Searching At Scale

Search at Scale Hadoop, Katta & Solr the smores of Search

Issues
Managing the raw data
Building Indexes
Handling updates
Reliable Search
Search Latency

The Tools
HDFS for Raw Data Storage
SolrIndexWriter for building indexes (Solr-1301)
Katta for Search Latency
Katta for Reliable Search
Brute Force Map/Reduce for index updates
Near Real Time updates – Jason Rutherglen

HOW-TO SolrRecordWriter
Solr config with schema
An implementation of SolrDocumentConverter
A Hadoop Cluster you can trash, wrong tuning will crash your machines.
ZipFile Output – some compression, reduces the number of files in your hdfs, easy deployment. Use jar xf to unpack, zip will fail.

SolrRecordWriter and your Cluster
Each SolrRecordWriter instance uses substantial quantities of system resources:
Processor – analyzing the input records
Memory – buffering the processed index records
IOP, optimize saturates storage devices
Be very careful in how many instances you have running per machine.

Katta
Distributed Search
Replicated Indexes
Fault Tolerant
Direct deployment from hdfs

Katta Issues
Solr is a pig, run few instances per machine.
Large indexes can take time to copy in and start, consuming substantial io resources
Use hftp: to reference your indexes, passes through firewalls and hdfs version independent.
Use one of the balancing distribution policies
Nodes don’t handle Solr OOMs gracefully

Search Latency
Run as many replicas of your indexes as needed to ensure that your latency is low enough
Run as many solr front ends to manage latency.

Solr Issues
Poorly chosen facets can cause OOMs be careful
Solr is slow to start, so rolling new indexes in takes time
Solr is a black box to Katta, unlike Lucene which is intimate.

Updates
Brute Force, rebuild the entire corpus and redeploy
Distribute updates to deployed indexes (not implemented)
Merge indexes (Jason Rutherglen)
Distribute new indexes and handle merge in the fronting solr intances (not implemented)

Code and Configurations
We run a 12 node katta cluster, with 3 masters and 3 zookeeper machines, for 18 machines.
We give each kata node jvm 4gig of heap.
I run 1-3 solr front end instances with 6gig of heap,
Code and configurations will be on www.prohadoop.com , for members.

Searching At Scale

by Yahoo! Developer Network

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