Java Developers have long been familiar with the power of the Apache Lucene open source search library, and have made it a top project both in the Java world and the apache world.

Because search applications can address an ambitious diversity of document indexes, searches, and queries, native Lucene Java application developers are often challenged to account for variations in performance of their Lucene application. It is vital to the developers to understand how quickly a native java application building in Lucene search can build/update an index, return a search result, process a query, and similar search operations.

By introducing LucidGaze for Lucene, Lucid Imagination offers the Lucene Java Application developer community a unique, application centric perspective on their search performance. While great advances have been made in recent years in java performance and java analysis at the JVM and OS level, experts such as Kirk Pepperdine (see http://www.infoq.com/articles/the-box ) recommend that analysis focus on the nature of the application behavior.

Understanding the relative efficiencies of Lucene operations is a vital task in analyzing and optimizing search, to deliver faster, more efficient results, both in terms of faster/better search output and in terms of making sure that search applications built with Lucene deliver superior business results. LucidGaze for Lucene offers a broad set of instrumentation into Lucene Java application operations, so developers can see exactly what their search app is doing, where it can be improved and where it is sensitive to various user needs. It can isolate long running queries that consume an unfair share of resources, expose inefficiencies in design, pinpoint fields or documents that cause processing bottlenecks — all in order to find where performance improvement work will have the greatest impact.

Lucid Imagination made extra efforts to make LucidWorks for Lucene easy to install and use everywhere Lucene is used. We assumed no prerequisites other than Lucene, and insisted on zero search application code changes in order to serve every stack configuration out there, to allow existing Lucene applications to readily benefit from it.

LucidGaze for Lucene is now freely available; check it out here. Please feel free to leave us feedback, either as a comment here, or directly to me, at eran.yaniv at lucidimagination.com