In my project, entire searching and listing of content is depend on Lucene. I am not facing any performance issues. Still, the project is in development phase and long way to go in production.
I have to find out the performance issues before the project completed in large structure. Whether the excessive use of lucene is feasible or not?
As an example, I have about 3 GB of text in a Lucene index, and it functions very quickly (milliseconds response times on searches, filters, and sorts). This index contains about 300,000 documents.
Hope that gave some context to your concerns. This is in a production environment.