A common misstep for a developer who is implementing Lucene for the first time is to stuff an overabundance of data inside it, reducing performance. For someone who doesn't have a background in natural language processing or information retrieval, some data normalization steps may not come naturally. This post specifically regards Zend_Search_Lucene, but much of my advice can be abstracted across various languages to other Lucene ports, such as Lucene.NET.