For some additional information about the performance of caponia, heres some details about the pain points: The particular pathological case for this system is

For some additional information about the performance of caponia, heres some details about the pain points: The particular pathological case for this system is query where the search stems occur in the majority of documents (there is a small exclusion list that helps, but its not a panacea) because the merging of stem results is at best a linear operation (:or queries are currently much simpler than :and queries) The other difficult case for this system is updating or removing a document from the index; removal is fairly easy: generate the stems for the current state and update those stems in the index. To update (an existing document in the index) efficiently you need the set of stems in both old and new versions of the document; For the stems that are in new set you can just add them to the index as normal. For the difference of the old set and the new set (ie, those stems only in the old set - clojure's difference function is not symmetric i believe) you then need to remove the document id from those stems in the index. edit: clarified meaning of update.