Performance Evaluation of a Distributed Architecture for Information Retrieval

Information explosion across the Internet and elsewhere offers access to an increasing number of document collections. In order for users to e ectively access these collections, information retrieval (IR) systems must provide coordinated, concurrent, and distributed access. In this paper, we describe a fully functional distributed IR system based on the Inquery uni ed IR system. To re ne this prototype, we implement a exible simulation model that analyzes performance issues given a wide variety of system parameters and con gurations. We present a series of experiments that measure response time, system utilization, and identify bottlenecks. We vary numerous system parameters, such as the number of users, text collections, terms per query, and workload to generalize our results for other distributed IR systems. Based on our initial results, we recommend simple changes to the prototype and evaluate the changes using the simulator. Because of the signi cant resource demands of informatio...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1996
• Where: SIGIR
• Authors: Brendon Cahoon, Kathryn S. McKinley
• Keywords: Functional Distributed Ir, Information Management, IR Systems, SIGIR 1996, Uni Ed Ir