I have index about 150,000 text documents with Swish-e under Windows, and
I have been trying to use the same index on a webserver running Net BSD
(64 bit Alpha).

I can search the index just find under Windows.  But, when I try searching
using Net BSD, swish-e reports that the index version is invalid.  I used
the exact same source package to build swish-e on both systems.

Can someone tell me if indexes that are created on one platform can be
searched on a different platform?

I also tried indexing a small subset of the files on Net BSD.  Searches
using this index worked fine, but for some reason the index was about
twice the size of a comparable index built under Windows using the same
files with the same options!  This makes me wonder if swish-e may be
writting some variables in the index in a 64-bit form instead of 32-bit. 
That would (possibly) explain the difference in size, but I am still not
entirely sure that is what is happening here.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

BTW: I am running swish-e version 2.4.2 on both platforms.

Regards,
William Osborne
wbo@freeshell.org