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  1. Lucene - Core
  2. LUCENE-565

Supporting deleteDocuments in IndexWriter (Code and Performance Results Provided)

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Details

    • Bug
    • Status: Patch Available
    • Major
    • Resolution: Fixed
    • None
    • 2.1
    • core/index
    • None
    • Patch Available

    Description

      Today, applications have to open/close an IndexWriter and open/close an
      IndexReader directly or indirectly (via IndexModifier) in order to handle a
      mix of inserts and deletes. This performs well when inserts and deletes
      come in fairly large batches. However, the performance can degrade
      dramatically when inserts and deletes are interleaved in small batches.
      This is because the ramDirectory is flushed to disk whenever an IndexWriter
      is closed, causing a lot of small segments to be created on disk, which
      eventually need to be merged.

      We would like to propose a small API change to eliminate this problem. We
      are aware that this kind change has come up in discusions before. See
      http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/lucene/java-dev/23049?search_string=indexwriter%20delete;#23049
      . The difference this time is that we have implemented the change and
      tested its performance, as described below.

      API Changes
      -----------
      We propose adding a "deleteDocuments(Term term)" method to IndexWriter.
      Using this method, inserts and deletes can be interleaved using the same
      IndexWriter.

      Note that, with this change it would be very easy to add another method to
      IndexWriter for updating documents, allowing applications to avoid a
      separate delete and insert to update a document.

      Also note that this change can co-exist with the existing APIs for deleting
      documents using an IndexReader. But if our proposal is accepted, we think
      those APIs should probably be deprecated.

      Coding Changes
      --------------
      Coding changes are localized to IndexWriter. Internally, the new
      deleteDocuments() method works by buffering the terms to be deleted.
      Deletes are deferred until the ramDirectory is flushed to disk, either
      because it becomes full or because the IndexWriter is closed. Using Java
      synchronization, care is taken to ensure that an interleaved sequence of
      inserts and deletes for the same document are properly serialized.

      We have attached a modified version of IndexWriter in Release 1.9.1 with
      these changes. Only a few hundred lines of coding changes are needed. All
      changes are commented by "CHANGE". We have also attached a modified version
      of an example from Chapter 2.2 of Lucene in Action.

      Performance Results
      -------------------
      To test the performance our proposed changes, we ran some experiments using
      the TREC WT 10G dataset. The experiments were run on a dual 2.4 Ghz Intel
      Xeon server running Linux. The disk storage was configured as RAID0 array
      with 5 drives. Before indexes were built, the input documents were parsed
      to remove the HTML from them (i.e., only the text was indexed). This was
      done to minimize the impact of parsing on performance. A simple
      WhitespaceAnalyzer was used during index build.

      We experimented with three workloads:

      • Insert only. 1.6M documents were inserted and the final
        index size was 2.3GB.
      • Insert/delete (big batches). The same documents were
        inserted, but 25% were deleted. 1000 documents were
        deleted for every 4000 inserted.
      • Insert/delete (small batches). In this case, 5 documents
        were deleted for every 20 inserted.

      current current new
      Workload IndexWriter IndexModifier IndexWriter
      -----------------------------------------------------------------------
      Insert only 116 min 119 min 116 min
      Insert/delete (big batches) – 135 min 125 min
      Insert/delete (small batches) – 338 min 134 min

      As the experiments show, with the proposed changes, the performance
      improved by 60% when inserts and deletes were interleaved in small batches.

      Regards,
      Ning

      Ning Li
      Search Technologies
      IBM Almaden Research Center
      650 Harry Road
      San Jose, CA 95120

      Attachments

        1. LUCENE-565.Feb2007.patch
          60 kB
          Michael McCandless
        2. NewIndexModifier.Jan2007.take3.patch
          33 kB
          Michael McCandless
        3. NewIndexModifier.Jan2007.take2.patch
          33 kB
          Michael McCandless
        4. NewIndexModifier.Jan2007.patch
          33 kB
          Ning Li
        5. NewIndexModifier.Sept21.patch
          18 kB
          Ning Li
        6. perf-test-res2.JPG
          103 kB
          Doron Cohen
        7. TestBufferedDeletesPerf.java
          10 kB
          Doron Cohen
        8. perf-test-res.JPG
          73 kB
          Doron Cohen
        9. perfres.log
          3 kB
          Doron Cohen

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              mikemccand Michael McCandless
              ningli Ning Li
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                Updated:
                Resolved: