Performance evaluation of a distributed architecture for information retrieval

Information explosion across the Internet and elsewhere offersaccess toanincreasing number of document collections. In order for users to effectively 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 unified IR system. To refine this prototype, we implement a flexible simulation model that analyzes perwhich a large number of clients and servers communicate. 1 This model allows us to investi@.e systems that vary from our implementation. We measure system response time,