[LUCENE-2962] Skip data should be inlined into the postings lists

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Open
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Unresolved
• Component/s: core/index
• Labels: gsoc2014
• Lucene Fields: New
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Michael McCandless
• Created: 10/Mar/11 16:58
• Updated: 28/Aug/22 12:42

Description

Today, we store all skip data as a separate blob at the end of a given term's postings (if that term occurs in enough docs to warrant skip data).

But this adds overhead during decoding – we have to seek to a different place for the initial load, we have to init separate readers, we have to seek again while using the lower levels of the skip data, etc. Also, we have to fully decode all skip information even if we are not going to use it (eg if I only want docIDs, I still must decode position offset and lastPayloadLength).

If instead we interleaved skip data into the postings file, we could keep it local, and "private" to each file that needs skipping. This should make it least costly to init and then use the skip data, which'd be a good perf gain for eg PhraseQuery, AndQuery.