Case Study: NetDocuments achieves pause-free, high-scale Apache Solr search with Azul Systems' Azul Platform Prime

NetDocuments Next Generation Platform is a Success — Thanks to Azul Platform Prime and Apache Solr

NetDocuments, a long‑standing SaaS document management provider used by legal, real estate, financial and healthcare organizations, migrated its search platform from Microsoft FAST to Apache Solr to handle massive, multi‑tenant indices. During beta testing the Solr deployment suffered unacceptable, minute‑long Java garbage‑collection pauses that slowed searches and threatened user experience, so the team evaluated Azul Platform Prime to address the problem.

NetDocuments deployed Azul Platform Prime alongside Apache Solr; the product installed in about five minutes with no application changes and immediately eliminated the long pauses, reducing peak pauses from over 40 seconds to under 5 milliseconds. Azul Platform Prime also enabled production use of very large heaps (about 150 GB per instance), improved throughput via faster compilers, removed stalls caused by JVM GC, and allowed NetDocuments to launch Solr in production with better search latency and scalability.

NetDocuments

Mou Nandi

Search Engineer and Architect