I've been playing around with the fts plugins and currently have solr up and running. While the initial indexing time is pretty rough, the search performance is impressive. I've run into a problem though- so far as I can tell, thunderbird (and most other popular clients?) won't actually take advantage of it. Even using thunderbird's advanced search and checking the 'run serach on server' box doesn't push the search to the server. If most popular clients don't support it, there doesn't seem much point in setting it up; which is a shame, solr beats the snot out of the built in search for thunderbird.
That said, is anyone running any of the fts plugins in a large scale environment? If so, what kind of scaling issues do you see? How do the search servers compare hardware wise to users count/spool size?
-- Kelsey Cummings - kgc@corp.sonic.net sonic.net, inc. System Architect 2260 Apollo Way 707.522.1000 Santa Rosa, CA 95407