The Performance Envelope of Inverted Indexing on Modern Hardware
This work addresses performance bottlenecks in search indexing for developers and researchers, but it is incremental as it confirms existing hardware limitations rather than proposing new methods.
The paper investigates the performance limits of traditional inverted indexing on modern hardware, finding that physical media characteristics are the primary determinants of indexing throughput, with isolation of source and target media yielding the best results, and concludes that further algorithmic gains are unlikely without redesigning the pipeline.
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.