Account Resources

Opensolr does not bill by the number of requests. It bills the bytes your index sends back. A tight query and a sloppy one cost the same to make, but not the same to answer.

On a pre-paid plan you are billed for the outgoing bytes sent from your Opensolr index to your site or app. Nothing else. Not the number of queries, not the size of your index, not the traffic your own site receives.

• Bots and crawlers visit search pages far more than people do, and each visit becomes a query against your index.
• Heavy responses multiply that. A search page that returns full documents with every field makes every bot visit expensive.
• A sudden overnight spike is almost always a crawler loop or a scripted attack on the search page, not real visitors.

• Read the bandwidth saving tips: field lists, paging, filters and caching, in the order they usually pay off.
• Follow the best practices guide when you build the queries in the first place.
• Find the source in your logs before you tune anything. Opensolr logs every request to your index, and you can see all of it in three places below.

The request log faceted by IP address and request path.

Traffic and query analytics for one index.

Popular queries and where the traffic comes from.

The live request log, as it comes in.

The same log, filtered down to one source.

If the numbers still do not add up, contact us with the index name and we will look at the log with you.

🧠 Solr RAM & Memory Management: Best Practices (or, “How Not to Blow Up Your Server”)

Solr is a beast—it loves RAM like a dog loves a steak. If your Solr server is gobbling up memory and crashing, don’t panic! Here’s what you need to know, plus battle-tested ways to keep things lean, mean, and not out-of-memory.

Why Does Solr Use So Much RAM?

Solr eats memory to build search results, cache data, and keep things fast.
But:

• Bad configuration or huge, inefficient requests can cause even the biggest server to choke and burn through RAM.
• Sometimes, small indexes on giant machines will still crash if your setup isn’t right.
• Good news: Opensolr has self-healing—if Solr crashes, it’ll be back in under a minute. Still, prevention is better than panic.

Essential Best Practices

1. Save Transfer Bandwidth (and Memory)

Want to save bandwidth and RAM? Read these tips.
Optimizing your queries is a win-win: less data in and out, and less stress on your server.

2. Don’t Ask Solr to Return 10 Million Results

• Requesting thousands of docs in one go?
  That makes Solr allocate all that data, and cache it, too.
• Solution: Keep the rows parameter below 100 for most queries.
  Example:

  &rows=100
  

3. Paginate Responsibly (Or: Don’t Scroll to Infinity)

• If you’re paginating over millions of docs (like &start=500000&rows=100), Solr has to allocate a ton of memory for all those results.
• Solution: Try to keep start under 50,000 if possible.
• The more stored fields you have in your schema, the more RAM will be used for large paginations.

4. Heavy Faceting, Sorting, Highlighting, or Grouping? Use docValues=true

• Operations like faceting, sorting, highlighting, and grouping can be memory hogs.

• Solution: Define your fields with docValues="true" in schema.xml.

• Example:

  <field name="name" docValues="true" type="text_general" indexed="true" stored="true" />
  

• For highlighting, you may want even more settings:

  <field name="description" type="text_general" indexed="true" stored="true" docValues="true" termVectors="true" termPositions="true" termOffsets="true" storeOffsetsWithPositions="true" />
  

5. Don’t Go Cache-Crazy

Solr caches are great... until they eat all your memory and leave nothing for real work.

• The big four:

  • filterCache: stores document ID lists for filter queries (fq)
  • queryResultCache: stores doc IDs for search results
  • documentCache: caches stored field values
  • fieldCache: stores all values for a field in memory (dangerous for big fields!)

• Solution: Tune these in solrconfig.xml and keep sizes low.

• Example:

  <filterCache size="1" initialSize="1" autowarmCount="0"/>
  

6. Using Drupal?

• Always update your Search API Solr module to the latest version!
• There’s a known bug that can cause headaches—stay patched!

Final Wisdom

• RAM is precious. Don’t let Solr treat it like an all-you-can-eat buffet.
• Optimize requests, paginate wisely, and keep configs tight.
• If Solr OOMs (“Out of Memory”)—Opensolr’s got your back, but wouldn’t you rather avoid the drama?

Questions? Want a config review or more tips? Contact the Opensolr team!