Solarium is a library I often use at Enrise for querying Solr. For one of the projects I work on, AutoTrack.nl a second hand car site, I was having issues on advanced faceting with Solr which I could easily solve using Solarium. [...] Faceting is a technique for guided navigation where search results are separated into categories, often including counts on those categories. The user can then select from those categories to restrict their search step by step.

He includes an example of what kind of results this sort of searching could return and how you can use the "facet.mincount" to restrict the results to an even finer set. There's a bit of code included showing how to use this filtering method with a combination of "addFilterQuery" and "createFacetField" calls before executing the select through Solarium.

Solr supports multiple output formats. Some are for general use (xml, json) and some are even language specific. If you're using PHP these are the most logical response writer formats: xml, json, phps (serialized php), php (php code to execute). On top of that PHP offers multiple ways to parse XML. I'm benchmarking these options to determine the most efficient decoding to implement in the next major version of Solarium, but the results should be useful for any PHP Solr implementation.

He includes a snippet of code he's using to generate the benchmarks, a PHPUnit test that pulls in two different json-based results and, for now, just runs a json_decode on it. You can see the results of his testing here, graphing out the different response handling methods and their time (in milliseconds) to parse the response. It's interesting to see that there's a direct relation to the size of the data set and how long it takes for the methods to execute.

The current code for his benchmarks is available over on github

I've worked on a lot of Solr implementations in PHP applications. There are multiple solutions: manual HTTP requests, the solr-php-client library, custom implementations etcetera. However they all have one issue in common: they only handle the communication with Solr, many other important parts like query building are not covered at all. And the parts that are covered are usually over-simplified. [...] At first I developed it as a library for my own projects, but I've decided to turn it into an opensource project. The project is called 'Solarium' and can be found on github: https://github.com/basdenooijer/solarium

You can find complete details about the project over on its wiki including basics concepts of query flow and using the ping/select/update query methods to access your Solr server.