[Xapian-devel] How the matcher knows when to prune and decay

[Matt Chaput]

Hi all, I have a question about Xapian internals, and since I don't speak enough C++ to find out the answer from the source code, I thought I'd ask here.

Since Xapian can prune or mutate the matching tree based on the largest possible future score from the branch, I assumed Xapian stored postings in decreasing order of frequency/weight/whatever. But recently I found some documentation that said Xapian stores postings in document order.

So I'm wondering, how does the matcher know the maximum score of the rest of the postings in a branch?

Thanks for your time!

Matt