CASE STUDY

Built for the Big Screen: How Vue Cinemas Runs Apache Solr in production without downtime

Vue Cinemas uses a defined recovery model to keep search available during failover and protect the customer experience at scale

“SearchStax disaster recovery has saved us more than once. Production search without DR is a risk we won’t take”

Paul Duce | Solutions Architect, Vue Cinemas

Where Search Performance Meets Revenue Risk

The onsite search function starts the customer journey at Vue Cinemas. Customers use it to find films, showtimes, locations and seats before they ever reach checkout. If search slows down or fails, the path to customer experience breaks.

Vue runs a modern digital estate across multiple territories and faces sharp traffic spikes when major films go on sale. Paul Duce, Technical Lead at Vue Cinemas, described that demand as “very spiky,” with major film releases each year causing sudden surges that require capacity to be ready before the spike arrives.

For Vue, the challenge wasn’t whether Apache Solr could perform; the challenge was how to keep Solr reliable in production, recover fast during an event and support expansion without turning search infrastructure into another operational burden. SearchStax Managed Search gave Vue a way to maintain Solr control, meet recovery requirements and keep customer-facing search available at scale.

In this case study, you’ll learn how Vue Cinemas was able to:

Reduce the operational burden of managing Solr infrastructure
Improve confidence in uptime and performance for customer-facing search experiences
Strengthen disaster recovery readiness and business continuity planning
Free internal teams to focus more on digital experience and less on infrastructure management

Search Reliability Directly Affects Ticket Revenue

Cinema customers don’t search casually. They search to decide and act. They want to find a film, confirm a location, secure a time and complete a booking fast. When that experience fails, the risk is tangible. It affects customer conversion at the moment of intent. That makes search infrastructure more important than it may appear on the surface.

Vue also operates across growing territories, with the UK still its dominant market and newer markets such as Italy, Poland, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark and Lithuania expanding the footprint. That growth raises the need for consistent search performance across a broader customer base.

As they expanded, Solr itself wasn’t the problem. Vue originally chose Solr for performance and complexity reasons. The real issue was dealing with the self-managed Solr burden. Instead of spending valuable internal time managing the Solr infrastructure, the team moved to SearchStax Managed Search service to achieve the right balance of control, scale and recovery.

Managed Search Gave Vue Control Without DIY Solr Overhead

Paul described the value of Managed Search as “control versus convenience.” Vue needed a service that could support pre-planned capacity ahead of sharp ticket-sale spikes, not a generic SaaS model that removed too much control over how demand gets handled. SearchStax fit because it empowered Vue to plan for predictable release-driven surges without taking on the full operational burden of running Solr alone.

That mattered because sudden traffic curves were too steep for reactive scaling alone. Once tickets go on sale, the rise is so sharp that many systems aren’t quick enough to respond after the spike begins. Vue needed the ability to prepare capacity before that demand hit.

The service also simplified expansion. Paul explained SearchStax acts as a “single port of call,” which made it one less core technology for Vue to worry about as new territories came online. Instead of focusing on the mechanics of Solr infrastructure, the team could focus on customer-facing delivery and performance bottlenecks that actually matter to the business.

Why Doesn’t Uptime Equal Recovery

The best search experience goes unnoticed when it works. Customers only notice when it slows down or fails at the moment they want to book.

SearchStax provides industry-leading 99.95% SLA-backed uptime for fully managed multi-cloud Solr, but uptime only covers normal operation. Vue draws a clear distinction between uptime and recovery. Recovery determines what happens when something outside normal operation fails, including cloud-region issues. When that occurs, the business cannot afford to be unavailable when customers are ready to transact. Because business continuity is equally as valuable as uptime, Paul and the team at Vue have a defined recovery model to govern how production search resumes during disruption.

“Disaster recovery with SearchStax has saved us multiple times. When an event occurs, failover is near-instant and our customers never feel it. For any production search workload, disaster recovery is not optional. It is the difference between a bad day internally and a bad experience for customers.”

– Paul Duce

Reliability isn’t theoretical. With Managed Search, recovery follows a defined path. During an event, traffic reroutes within minutes, preserving ticket discovery and transactions. When it comes to disaster recovery Paul doesn’t view it as an optional add-on. For Vue, DR is a non-negotiable requirement for the service from the start.

How to Right-Size Search Capacity

One of the clearest gains from managed search is time.

Vue uncovered inefficiencies in its search environment as usage grew. As cluster allocation rose to 128GB the cluster became over prescribed, but improved monitoring and analysis helped the team to reduce it to 32GB by removing unused data and correcting indexing patterns.

This changed how Vue manages search. Instead of reacting to growth with more infrastructure, the team now has better visibility into performance and can adjust capacity based on actual demand.

When Solr infrastructure no longer demands the same level of in-house attention, teams can shift effort toward higher-value work. Vue treats Managed Search as an active part of its operating model including ongoing communication with SearchStax to keep performance and infrastructure aligned. That may include experience improvements, search tuning, release planning or broader digital initiatives that customers actually feel.

A Stronger Foundation for What Comes Next

How do you run Solr in production without downtime?

Vue Cinemas runs Solr in production by removing infrastructure ownership, defining recovery upfront before failures occur. Search is no longer infrastructure that Vue Cinemas needs to manage directly. It’s a service that delivers uptime, performance at scale, and recovery, that allows them to focus on improving the customer experience and do more with their data.

The takeaway is simple. Production search requires more than uptime. It requires a managed service that plans for failure, responds predictably, and protects the customer experience at the moment it matters.

With a managed Solr-as-a-Service in place, Vue supports ongoing digital improvements without adding operational burden. That creates space for better planning, better resilience and a more confident path forward.

Vue Cinemas Search Results

Supports major film releases with on-demand search capacity
Right-sizes infrastructure inefficiencies with improved monitoring
Achieves business continuity with defined disaster recovery plans
Preserves customer experience with failover within minutes
More internal bandwidth for digital experience improvements
A more dependable foundation for future growth and change
Simplifies regional expansion with a single point of contact for Solr deployments across the growing Vue footprint

Product

Managed Search

Platform

Custom, Sitecore

Location

EMEA

Industry

Media and Entertainment

Let’s talk about how you can drive better site search experiences and gain insights with SearchStax