There are times when you want to optimize your Solr index. But what is optimize and why do I care?

Optimize is similar to when you defragment your hard drive. Solr will create a new index removing any deleted documents. It is simply house keeping at its best.

I usually do a commit from the Admin UI, going to the overview tab. 

However, sometimes we might want to do it programatically, a good example being when you have a spell checker configured to build the dictionary on optimize. The url to optimize is very simple, here is an example with my localhost, just replace with your Solr

http://localhost:8983/solr/yourcore/update?stream.body=<optimize><query>*:*</query></optimize>

Notice how the # is removed from all REST calls vs when the Admin UI loads.

Happy optimizing!

Many times have I stopped and restarted Solr to reload a core, yes it is kind of a rookie way as you can always go to the Admin UI, Core Admin and reload Core.

But what if you wanted to have a really fast way of reloading your core?

Just do it via the admin handler!
http://{SOLR IP}:{SOLR PORT}/solr/admin/cores?action=RELOAD&core={CORE NAME}

You can even add it to your code and make a simple call or better yet use SolrNet via the admin functionality found below:

https://github.com/mausch/SolrNet/blob/master/Documentation/Core-admin.md