Table of Contents
Using Solr Shards
IMPORTANT: This page refers to features that were added in VuFind 1.1. If you are using an earlier version, you will have to upgrade.
Solr is capable of combining results from multiple indexes on different servers.
Use Cases
Solr sharding may be useful under several circumstances:
- You have such a large index that you need more than one server to handle it
- You have multiple VuFind instances for different specialized purposes, and you want to create an additional “meta-instance” to search all of them at once
Requirements
- The indexes being combined must have identical (or at least very similar) schemas.
- The indexes being combined MUST NOT have overlapping record IDs.
Configuration
All of the basic configuration of shards can be found in the [IndexShards] and [ShardPreferences] sections of web/conf/config.ini under your VuFind installation. Each of the settings is documented by the comments in that file.
Additionally, a [StripFacets] section exists in web/conf/facets.ini. This setting can be used to filter out facets that are incompatible with specific shards – this allows indexes with slightly varying schemas to be combined cleanly.
