Sitecore is one of the leading content management and marketing platforms in the market today. Sitecore uses a search engine for two purposes in a standard implementation – Content Search and xConnect Search. Since Sitecore version 7.0, Apache Solr has been the recommended default indexing engine.

Running and operating self-managed Solr environments is no easy task. With SearchStax Cloud, we take the hassle and frustration of running Solr operations out of your hands with a flexible and easy-to-deploy, easy-to-use service.

For those organizations who prefer to run self-managed Solr environments, there are many best practices to keep operations running as smoothly as possible. We highlight five guiding principles for optimizing Solr within a Sitecore deployment, developed first-hand by SearchStax’s dedicated Solr experts and engineers. 

For specific guidance on implementing Sitecore, reach out to an implementation partner, your development team or Sitecore Support for detailed assistance. We are providing these suggestions as general guidelines for Sitecore developers who are using or planning to use Solr for indexing.

The five key principles for optimizing Solr within a Sitecore deployment include:

1. Avoid using the synchoronous index strategy
2. Increase IntervalAsynchronous Interval
3. Control the frequency of publish operations
4. Increase the value of  contentSearch.Update.BatchSize
5. Reduce ContentSearch.SearchMaxResults