Performance of Inverted Indices in Shared-Nothing Distributed Text Document Information Retrieval Systems

The performance of distributed text document retrieval systems is strongly influenced by the organization of the inverted index. This paper compares the performance impact on query processing of various physical organizations for inverted lists. We present a new probabilistic model of the database and queries. Simulation experiments determine which variables most strongly influence response time and throughput. This leads to a set of design trade-offs over a range of hardware configurations and new parallel query processing strategies.