Long, long time ago, we described a problem called deep paging. To keep things short – the deeper you want to go in the results, the slower the query will be. This is because Solr needs to prepare the data from the beginning for each query. Until Solr 4.7 there wasn’t a good solution for that problem. With the recently released Solr version, we got a possibility of using so called cursor to drastically improve performance of deep paging.
deep paging
Deep paging problem
Imagine the following problem – we have an application that expects Solr to return the results sorted on the basis of some field. Those results will be than paged in the GUI. However, if the person using the GUI application immediately selects the tenth, twentieth, or fiftieth page of search results there is a problem – the wait time. Is there anything we can do about this? Yes, we can help Solr a bit.