Yes, there is only one query that gets sent via Hibernate Search to the database to load the Item.class entities. There are no subsequent queries to load collections or other references.

I also playing with setting the DatabaseRetrievalMethod to FIND_BY_ID on the query. I realize this submits a DB call for each entity rather than a single DB call to load all entities in a single resultset handle. One would suspect this to be slower, but for page sizes of 100 and 250, this takes half the time that the default implementation uses.

If I wanted to plugin a customized Loader that just adds some additional debugging atop of the default Loader used by Hibernate, can I do that solely for this particular query or session? I tried googling how to do this but didn't seem to find any resources that clearly explained what the default loader was and how I could extend it and register it the way I wanted.