Your project is fascinating, but 8000 queries/hr is just over 2 queries/sec. Even bursting up to 10x that (20 QPS), it doesn’t seem surprising that it can run on consumer hardware? Am I missing something?
Well you got to consider a search engine isn't a blog where it just fetches a file off disk and is done with it, a trivial search query might as well be, but a non-trivial search query may have to do a search through dozens of megabytes of ids to produce its response (given these are the 800k documents that contain 'search', which of those contain 'engine', and which of those contain 'algorithm').
I honestly don't know what the actual limit is, all I know is it dealt with 2 QPS without affecting response times. But 2 QPS for a search engine is actually kind of a lot. Most people don't actually search that much. Like you get a few queries per day. Put it this way: 2 QPS is what you'd expect if you had around a million regular users. That's not half bad for consumer hardware.
