We are considering evaluating Hibernate search and I am writing to get some feedback from people with experience. I was wondering how Hibernate Search works with data that is mostly read only but a considerable amount of inserts do occur?

Is it designed for this or is this an inappropriate use case for Hibernate Search?

It is perfect for this type of applications;
I shared most information about our system at http://www.jbossworld.com/jbia/alintec/

Performance is incredible, all thanks to Hibernate Search and Lucene.
People mostly do searches, but some 50,000 entities are inserted and updated each day:
all handled by a single 4-core server without any slowdown.

I'll be happy to answer to more specific questions if you still are in doubt.

regards,