Method DeleteUnusedFiles

Expert: remove any index files that are no longer used.

IndexWriter normally deletes unused files itself, during indexing. However, on Windows, which disallows deletion of open files, if there is a reader open on the index then those files cannot be deleted. This is fine, because IndexWriter will periodically retry the deletion.

However, IndexWriter doesn't try that often: only on open, close, flushing a new segment, and finishing a merge. If you don't do any of these actions with your IndexWriter, you'll see the unused files linger. If that's a problem, call this method to delete them (once you've closed the open readers that were preventing their deletion).

In addition, you can call this method to delete unreferenced index commits. this might be useful if you are using an IndexDeletionPolicy which holds onto index commits until some criteria are met, but those commits are no longer needed. Otherwise, those commits will be deleted the next time Commit() is called.