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The Performance Envelope of Inverted Indexing on Modern Hardware

2019/10/24 by Jimmy Lin, Lin, Jimmy, L. D. Paniak +3
Computer Science · #Caching and Content Delivery #Data Management and Algorithms #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Information Retrieval (cs.IR) #Peer-to-Peer Network Technologies

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1910.11028

openalex publication_date 2019/10/24 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

This paper explores the performance envelope of "traditional" inverted indexing on modern hardware using the implementation in the open-source Lucene search library. We benchmark indexing throughput on a single high-end multi-core commodity server in a number of configurations varying the media of the source collection and target index, examining a network-attached store, a direct-attached disk array, and an SSD. Experiments show that the largest determinants of performance are the physical characteristics of the source and target media, and that physically isolating the two yields the highest indexing throughput. Results suggest that current indexing techniques have reached physical device limits, and that further algorithmic improvements in performance are unlikely without rethinking the inverted indexing pipeline in light of observed bottlenecks.

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