If you missed the SF Bay Area Lucene meetup last night, I thought I would give a recap of some of the highlights.  First off, thanks to salesforce.com for the use of their space on the 42nd floor of 1 Market St. in downtown S.F.  The views of the bay and the city were especially stunning at night with what appeared to be a full moon rising over the Bay Bridge.  Salesforce also brought in excellent food and drinks to help get the night started right.  After settling in, we had 3 talks, led off by Bill Press from salesforce.com on how they leverage Lucene to provide search for their customers.  Based on my notes (any error is mine), I heard the following numbers:

1. salesforce.com does 600 million indexing events per day with Lucene
2. 90% of all events take less than 3 minutes to make searchable
3. 150 million queries per month, with 75% completing in < 250 ms and 89% < 500 ms

I then gave a talk on practical relevance which was a shortened version of the talk I gave in Prague at Lucene Eurocon.

Finally, Jon Gifford of Loggly talked about how they use Apache Solr, and specifically the “Solr Cloud” work underway, along with ZeroMQ to index logs in the cloud.  Very interesting talk about real time indexing, shard management and high index volumes.

Last, but not least, there were a number of people who are looking to hire Lucene/Solr developers who introduced themselves to the crowd. As always, it was good to hear about people adopting Lucene and Solr, as well as hiring too.

As always, we will post the slides on the Meetup site as we gather them from the speakers.  Look forward to seeing you all next time!