💾 How to Save Your Monthly Bandwidth Like a Pro

Bandwidth: you don’t notice it... until you run out. Here’s how to keep your Opensolr search snappy without burning through your monthly gigabytes.

🧠 Smart Bandwidth Hacks

1. 🗃️ Use Local Caching (e.g., Memcache or Redis)

   • Cache your search results locally so you don’t have to hit Solr for every page reload, autocomplete, or back-button click.
   • Result: fewer requests, happier users, and much lower bandwidth usage!

2. 🔄 Solr Replication Magic

   • Bandwidth is per-index. So, if you want to double (or triple) your available bandwidth, set up Solr Replication.
   • Create Index A, replicate to Index B, then have your application perform round-robin queries across both. Voila! Twice the bandwidth pool for your heavy-hitting queries.
   • (Think of it as the “BOGO” deal for bandwidth.)

3. 🎯 Return Only What You Need

   • Tweak your /select requests using the rows and fl parameters to only fetch the records and fields you truly need.
   • Example:
     /select?q=mysearch&rows=10&fl=id,title
     Don’t pull the whole database just because you can—every extra byte eats into your bandwidth.

💡 Extra Tips

• Audit Your Queries: Are you returning 100,000 records and only displaying 10? That’s a lot of wasted bandwidth.
• Compress Responses: If your app supports it, enable gzip compression for Solr responses.
• Monitor Usage: Use Opensolr’s control panel or logs to see which queries are your biggest bandwidth hogs—and optimize accordingly.

Master these tricks and your bandwidth will go further, your bills will shrink, and your search users will never know you’ve become a traffic ninja. 🥷

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