One of the many performance improvements in the upcoming Solr 1.4 release involves improved filtering performance. Solr 1.4 filters are both faster (anywhere from 30% to 80% faster to calculate intersections, depending on configuration), take less memory (40% smaller), and are more efficiently applied to the query during a search.
In previous Solr releases, filters were applied after the main query and thus had little impact on overall query performance. Filters are now checked in parallel with the query, resulting in greater speedups the fewer documents that match the filters.
Example: Adding a filter that matched 10% of a large index resulted in a 300% performance increase for a dismax query consisting of three words on a single field with proximity boost.
Related issues:
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SOLR-1169
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SOLR-1179
[...] Lucid Imagination » Filtered query performance increases for Solr 1.4. [...]
May 28, 2009 04:11 — Filtered query performance increases for Solr 1.4
[...] all well and good but it doesn’t help speed your query up like you think it should. The new version applies the filters in parallel to the main query significantly speeding up searches with common queries and query filters by 30% [...]
June 23, 2009 07:56 — Derivante » SOLR Filtering Performance Increase
Applying a filter is functionally the same as {Initial Query} AND {Filter} in Lucene… Are SOLR filters faster than that? Yes, faceting is extremely faster in 1.4, but you are talking about filters…
August 25, 2009 07:48 — Fuad Efendi
Probabably faster for “uninverted” term-cache in SOLR 1.4 (for multivalued, tokenized); for singlevalued probably FilterCache (which uses Lucene FieldCache?) – would be nice to compare with standard Lucene {Query} AND {Filter} performance.
August 25, 2009 07:52 — Fuad Efendi
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May 18, 2010 16:15 — Filtered query performance increases for Solr 1.4 « Widgetti