[Xesam] Why is vendor.maxhits read-only?

[Joe Shaw]

Hi,

On 12/18/07, Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen <mikkel.kamstrup at gmail.com> wrote:
> Ok, I think get the picture now. Thanks for the detailed explanation.
> I'm still not sure that I can accept that it should be so costly to
> have a paging interface, but let us let that rest for now.

The paging interface itself isn't necessarily the expensive part; it's
creating a Lucene Document instance for every hit and then sorting
them somehow by date.

Like I mentioned in my reply to Jamie, doing the paging if we have all
this data is pretty trivial.  But getting that data is what's a pain.
Without even considering CPU or memory usage, just think of the amount
of time it would take to pull several hundred thousand hits off the
disk.

It's not an unreasonable use case.  When I was working at Novell my
desktop had about 200k files and another 700k emails in addition to
various other sources of data.  Searching for "gnome" understandably
returned somewhere between 350-500k results.

Joe