Hey, Websolr founder here.<p>Websolr's indexes return in under 50ms for queries of average complexity.<p>The more expensive queries usually involve "faceting" or sorting a large number of results. For an example, say you search Github for "while." Github used to do language facets, where it would tell you that out of a million results, 200103 files were in javascript, 500358 files were in C, etc.<p>The problem with this is that you have to count over a million records, on every search! Unlike most search operations which are IO bound, the counting can be CPU-bound, so sharding on one box will let you take advantage of multiple cores.<p>Racoonone is "sorting on two dimensions, a geo bounding box, four numeric range filters, one datetime range filter, and a categorical range filter." This should put him in a cpu-bound range (in particular because of the sort).<p>Websolr has customers on sharded plans, but they are usually used in custom sales cases where we're serving many, many millions of documents. We'll look at adding sharding as an option to our default plans, so that they'll be more accessible for people like raccoonone. In the meantime, if you send an email to info@onemorecloud.com, we'll try to accomodate use cases like this.<p>Edit: Also, other possible optimizations include (1) indexing in the same order you will sort on, if you know ahead of time, and (2) using the TimeLimitedCollector.