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Hauptverfasser: Liang, Xin, Yang, Qing, Qiu, Wenru, Mao, Wenjie, Ma, Tianyu, Zhu, Minghui, Wang, Nan
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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Online-Zugang:https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01260
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author Liang, Xin
Yang, Qing
Qiu, Wenru
Mao, Wenjie
Ma, Tianyu
Zhu, Minghui
Wang, Nan
author_facet Liang, Xin
Yang, Qing
Qiu, Wenru
Mao, Wenjie
Ma, Tianyu
Zhu, Minghui
Wang, Nan
contents Large-scale search engines face a fundamental tension: the index must be updated frequently to maintain freshness, yet updates create resource contention that inflates query latency. In the dominant Lucene-based architecture, segment merges triggered by writes compete with concurrent queries for CPU cycles, disk I/O bandwidth, and operating-system page cache -- a problem we term \emph{write-read contention}. This survey systematically examines the architectural solutions that industry and academia have developed to decouple write pressure from read latency. We identify five principal patterns: (i)~node-level read-write separation; (ii)~compute-storage separation; (iii)~full in-memory indexing; (iv)~log-structured write paths; and (v)~in-place partial updates. We survey representative systems including Elasticsearch, LinkedIn Galene, Uber Sia, Quickwit, Alibaba Havenask, Algolia, Milvus, and Vespa, and discuss an emerging synthesis -- the ScaleSearch architecture -- that combines compute-storage separation with full in-memory indexing and dedicated write nodes. A key contribution of ScaleSearch is \emph{per-field update routing}: each field is assigned its own Kafka topic and update path, allowing scalar fields (price, stock, tags) to be updated in-place in $O(1)$ RAM with immediate visibility while full-text fields follow the segment-based compute-storage path. We conclude with open challenges in hybrid vector-and-full-text retrieval, serverless deployments, and AI-integrated search.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_01260
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Write-Read Decoupling in Modern Large-Scale Search Engines: Architectures, Techniques, and Emerging Approaches
Liang, Xin
Yang, Qing
Qiu, Wenru
Mao, Wenjie
Ma, Tianyu
Zhu, Minghui
Wang, Nan
Databases
Large-scale search engines face a fundamental tension: the index must be updated frequently to maintain freshness, yet updates create resource contention that inflates query latency. In the dominant Lucene-based architecture, segment merges triggered by writes compete with concurrent queries for CPU cycles, disk I/O bandwidth, and operating-system page cache -- a problem we term \emph{write-read contention}. This survey systematically examines the architectural solutions that industry and academia have developed to decouple write pressure from read latency. We identify five principal patterns: (i)~node-level read-write separation; (ii)~compute-storage separation; (iii)~full in-memory indexing; (iv)~log-structured write paths; and (v)~in-place partial updates. We survey representative systems including Elasticsearch, LinkedIn Galene, Uber Sia, Quickwit, Alibaba Havenask, Algolia, Milvus, and Vespa, and discuss an emerging synthesis -- the ScaleSearch architecture -- that combines compute-storage separation with full in-memory indexing and dedicated write nodes. A key contribution of ScaleSearch is \emph{per-field update routing}: each field is assigned its own Kafka topic and update path, allowing scalar fields (price, stock, tags) to be updated in-place in $O(1)$ RAM with immediate visibility while full-text fields follow the segment-based compute-storage path. We conclude with open challenges in hybrid vector-and-full-text retrieval, serverless deployments, and AI-integrated search.
title Write-Read Decoupling in Modern Large-Scale Search Engines: Architectures, Techniques, and Emerging Approaches
topic Databases
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01260