Hi, I've implemented a really trivial new backend (can be configured to replace the jms or lucene backends) called "blackhole" as the same named MySQL engine (http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/blackhole-storage- engine.html). It doesn't to anything :-P , and that's why it's useful! When replacing the default backend with it I can do some performance measures and profiling in hibernate search disabling the actual writing to an index; this was initially not meant to become a "feature" but was only a tool of mine to figure out some stats. I was thinking now that other people may find it useful to test settings and fine tune configurations, mostly to answer the question "why is it slow?". This way you can tell them "not because of indexing..." (writing at least). Do you think it could be useful to have this committed to trunk? I'll give it a short name "blakhole". Sanne