dovecot - Aug 2021 - What kind of search response time are you setting with solr full text search?

MY SETUP: I have apache solr full text search enabled with dovecot. I 
have an inbox with about 40 subfolders. I'm using the roundcube 
web-based mail client. The find command is showing 15823 email files and 
apache solr reports the same number. I'm running a dedicated mail server 
with a 1 GB of ram. The solr machine is running on a separate machine 
with 4 GB ram.

THE PROBLEM: When I do a full text search through all my inbox and all 
subfolders on a single word, search results are returned in about 10 to 
15 seconds. This is better than the 40 seconds or so I'm getting when I 
turn off the fts and fts_solr plugins but still a little disappointing.

WHAT I'D LIKE: Now, I don't expect instant search results like gmail, 
but getting the search results to display in less than 5 seconds would 
be a lot less painful that 10 to 15 seconds.

WHAT I'VE TRIED: I have reindexed the emails on solr to try to speed 
things upit up.

ANY ADVICE? Curious to know what response times others are seeing and if 
there is anything else I might try to speed things up. Maybe the number 
of subfolders is slowing things down?

> THE PROBLEM: When I do a full text search through all my inbox and all
> subfolders on a single word, search results are returned in about 10
> to 15 seconds. This is better than the 40 seconds or so I'm getting
> when I turn off the fts and fts_solr plugins but still a little
> disappointing.
I did some experimenting. I noticed that if the word I'm searching on is 
fairly rare, results will pop up quickly, like in around 3 to 5 seconds. 
Words that don't exist at all in any email returns nothing almost 
instantly.

But words that appear in several hundred emails are the ones that are 
take a much longer time.

Not sure if this just might be a slow email client or due to Dovecot 
itself or if maybe 1 GB of ram isn't enough and my machine is 
underpowered.

On 2021-08-24 08:53 PM, Steve Dondley wrote:
> MY SETUP: I have apache solr full text search enabled with dovecot. I
> have an inbox with about 40 subfolders. I'm using the roundcube
> web-based mail client. The find command is showing 15823 email files
> and apache solr reports the same number. I'm running a dedicated mail
> server with a 1 GB of ram. The solr machine is running on a separate
> machine with 4 GB ram.
> 
> THE PROBLEM: When I do a full text search through all my inbox and all
> subfolders on a single word, search results are returned in about 10
> to 15 seconds. This is better than the 40 seconds or so I'm getting
> when I turn off the fts and fts_solr plugins but still a little
> disappointing.
> 
> WHAT I'D LIKE: Now, I don't expect instant search results like
gmail,
> but getting the search results to display in less than 5 seconds would
> be a lot less painful that 10 to 15 seconds.
> 
> WHAT I'VE TRIED: I have reindexed the emails on solr to try to speed
> things upit up.
> 
> ANY ADVICE? Curious to know what response times others are seeing and
> if there is anything else I might try to speed things up. Maybe the
> number of subfolders is slowing things down?
OK, I figured it out. It was a bug in Debian's version of dovecot: 
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=970692

Upgrading to "Bulleyse" fixed things up nicely and I now have super
fast
search.

Now I have to go tackle the plugin errors that are crashing the 
roundcube install. :)