All queries in Lucene undergo a "rewriting" process. A query (and its sub-queries) may be rewritten one or more times, and the process continues until the query stops changing. This process allows Lucene to perform optimizations, such as removing redundant clauses, replacing one query for a more efficient execution path, etc. For example a Boolean → Boolean → TermQuery can be rewritten to a TermQuery, because all the Booleans are unnecessary in this case.

The rewriting process is complex and difficult to display, since queries can change drastically. Rather than showing the intermediate results, the total rewrite time is simply displayed as a value (in nanoseconds). This value is cumulative and contains the total time for all queries being rewritten.