Forcemerge function in Indexwriter class

Question

I wanted to know about a function in Solr3.5.0 in the IndexWriter class. can anyone let me know what exactly the forceMerge() function does. Does it optimize the segments?

Thanks,

Jeyaprakash

Answer 1

Yes, forceMerge is the successor of optimize. There are two main reasons for this renaming:

• Lucene multi-segment performance has increased a lot over the last years,
• Giving a less cool name to this method will prevent users from thinking that this method does some kind of magic and that any index is sub-optimal until this method has been called.

You can read more about this renaming at https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LUCENE-3454