very slow highlight performance in lucene

Question

Lucene (4.6) highlighter has very slow performance, when a frequent term is searched. Search is fast (100ms), but highlight may take more than an hour(!).

Detail

Answer 1

BestFragments relies on the tokenization done by the analyzer that you're using. If you have to analyse such a big text, you'd better to store term vector WITH_POSITIONS_OFFSETS at indexing time.

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By doing that, you won't need to analyze all the text at runtime as you can pick up a method to reuse the existing term vector and this will reduce the highlighting time.