Solr Operations: Collection Management and Performance

Introduction

Running Solr in production requires careful management of collections, backups, and performance tuning. This guide covers essential operations for maintaining healthy Solr deployments.

Collection Management

Creating Collections

# Create collection (SolrCloud)
curl "http://localhost:8983/solr/admin/collections?action=CREATE&name=products&numShards=3&replicationFactor=2&collection.configName=myconfig"

Collection Aliases

# Create alias
curl "http://localhost:8983/solr/admin/collections?action=CREATEALIAS&name=latest_products&router.field=prod_date"

# List collections
curl "http://localhost:8983/solr/admin/collections?action=LIST"

Collection API

# Reload collection
curl "http://localhost:8983/solr/admin/collections?action=RELOAD&name=products"

# Delete collection
curl "http://localhost:8983/solr/admin/collections?action=DELETE&name=old_products"

Backup and Restore

Backup

# Backup collection
curl "http://localhost:8983/solr/admin/collections?action=BACKUP&name=products_backup&collection=products&location=/backup/solr"

# List backups
curl "http://localhost:8983/solr/admin/collections?action=LISTBACKUP&location=/backup/solr"

Restore

# Restore collection
curl "http://localhost:8983/solr/admin/collections?action=RESTORE&name=products_backup&collection=products_restored&location=/backup/solr"

Security

Authentication

# Enable basic auth
curl -X POST --header "Content-Type: application/json" \
  --data '{"set-user": {"admin": "admin123"}}' \
  "http://localhost:8983/solr/admin/authentication"

Authorization

# Set permissions
curl -X POST --header "Content-Type: application/json" \
  --data '{"set-permission": {"name": "read", "role": "readers"}}' \
  "http://localhost:8983/solr/admin/authorization"

Monitoring

Metrics API

# Get metrics
curl "http://localhost:8983/solr/admin/metrics?group=core"

# Get JVM metrics
curl "http://localhost:8983/solr/admin/metrics?group=jvm"

Admin UI

# Access Solr Admin UI
http://localhost:8983/solr

# View:
# - Collection overview
# - Query distribution
# - Cache hit rates
# - Index size

Performance Tuning

Cache Configuration

// solrconfig.xml
<query>
  <filterCache class="solr.LRUCache" size="10000" initialSize="5120"/>
  <queryResultCache class="solr.LRUCache" size="10000" initialSize="5120"/>
  <documentCache class="solr.LRUCache" size="10000" initialSize="5120"/>
</query>

JVM Settings

# Set heap size
export SOLR_HEAP=4g

# In solr.in.sh
SOLR_HEAP=4g
GC_TUNE="-XX:+UseG1GC -XX:MaxGCPauseMillis=100"

Index Management

Commit Types

# Soft commit (near real-time)
curl -X POST "http://localhost:8983/solr/gettingstarted/update?softCommit=true"

# Hard commit (durable)
curl -X POST "http://localhost:8983/solr/gettingstarted/update?commit=true"

Merge Policy

// Configure merge policy
<mergePolicyFactory class="solr.TieredMergePolicyFactory">
  <int name="maxMergeAtOnce">10</int>
  <int name="segmentsPerTier">10</int>
</mergePolicyFactory>

Conclusion

Solr operations require attention to collections, backups, security, and monitoring. With proper management, Solr can handle enterprise-scale search workloads reliably.