Lucene's just a toolkit, it'll run in the same JVM that you're running clojure in, and while it can be memory-intensive if you're running a lot of searches over a big index, it's probably not any more memory intensive than what you're doing -- they've done a bunch of iterations already.<p>Maybe you were thinking of Solr?  That's the REST service that wraps Lucene but you can use the Lucene API from within your app just as easily if that fits your use case.