If you’ve worked with Sitecore and Solr, you’re no stranger to the Solr Admin UI.  There are great aspects to that UI, and some exciting extension points with Sitecore implications too, but I know one element of that Solr UI that causes some head-scratching . . . the “optimize now” feature:

The inclusion of the causes people to think “something is wrong . . . red bad . . . must click now!”

What is this Optimize?

I’m writing this for the benefit of Sitecore developers who may not be coming at this from a deep search background: do not worry if your Solr cores show this icon encouraging you to optimize now.  Fight that instinct.  For standard Sitecore Solr cores that are frequently updating, such as the sitecore_core_index, sitecore_master_index, sitecore_analytics_index, and — depending on your publishing strategy — sitecore_web_index, one may notice these…