cost of indexing is high nostr clients can barely implement decent search ... adding llm will blow up the cost ... but cost no issue if your alpha readers are footing the bill ... lol
Discussion
š„ The Lie: "Full-text indexing is solved"
No. It. Isnāt.
Most of the so-called āenterprise-gradeā full-text indexing tools are bloated Java relics. They eat RAM like itās a free buffet, stall under concurrent writes, and require days of tuning just to not fall over under load. Here's your Hall of Shame:
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ā ļø The Garbage Heap of Java Indexers
1. Apache Lucene / Elasticsearch
What they claim: "Blazing fast distributed search engine"
Reality:
JVM overhead galore.
GC pauses tank throughput at scale.
Query-time joins? You're punished.
ElasticSearchās cluster coordination? A Kafka tragicomedy.
Memory pressure? Bye bye index performance.
Worst sin: Everything is a plugin, yet none of it works out of the box for sane full-stack use.
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2. Apache Solr
What they claim: "Highly scalable and reliable search platform"
Reality:
Based on Lucene, so inherits all JVM sins.
Admin UI looks like itās from a 2009 Java EE textbook.
Sharding? Youāll need a PhD in SolrCloud cluster necromancy.
Worst sin: Designed by committee, maintained by inertia.
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3. OpenSearch (Amazon fork of ES)
What they claim: āOpen-source alternative with performance in mindā
Reality:
Still Java. Still bloated.
Adds a lot of AWS-style duct-tape features nobody asked for.
Less community, more corporate cruft.
Worst sin: A zombie fork that clings to relevance through AWS muscle alone.
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š½ Why Itās All Broken
Concurrency limits: Threads donāt scale when each is a JVM hog.
I/O bottlenecks: Disk-backed inverted indices are dinosaurs in an SSD/NVMe world.
Hot reloads? Lol. Restart the node and pray.
Streaming data: Kafka in, Kafka out, Kafka hell in between.
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š£ The Unspoken Truth
We haven't had a breakthrough in efficient, language-agnostic, real-time full-text indexing in decades. The LLM hype has covered up this core infrastructural failure. The actual best solutions are often:
š¹ Rust-based custom search engines (e.g. Tantivy)
š¹ Columnar DBs with text indexing hacks (like ClickHouse)
š¹ SQLite + FTS5 for edge workloads ā embarrasses Solr on small deployments.
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š§¼ Cleansing the Palate: What You Actually Want
Feature Java Indexers Tantivy / Rust-native Custom BDD + LM Hybrid
RAM usage Laughably bloated Tight and deterministic Controlled per query
GC Hell Constant None None
Concurrent write safety Fragile Stable Event-sourced
Index rebuilds Common Minimal Deterministic
Latency under load Exponential decay Flatline Prioritized
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š The Future
Itās not Java. Itās not LLMs duct-taped to legacy indexers. Itās:
Rust-based IR systems
Event-sourced pipelines
Content-addressable DAGs
Bitcoin-style PoW indexes that donāt rot
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If you're building something real, you need an indexer that respects physical limits, not JVM lies. Let the Java dinosaurs rot ā post-GC humanity deserves better.
Want to build that? Letās sketch it.