In a method of contention management in the distributed index and query system, one or more index processing threads of an index thread pool in a distributed computing environment is used to index documents buffered into a work queue buffer after being received via a network connection. Simultaneous to the indexing, one or more query processing threads of a query thread pool to is utilized to process received queries of indexed documents. A sum of the index processing threads and the query processing threads is a plurality of processing threads. Responsive to the work queue buffer reaching a predefined fullness, the work queue buffer is emptied into an allotted storage space in a data storage device. The number of index processing threads is set in a linear relationship to a ratio of a utilized amount of the allotted storage space to a total amount of the allotted storage space.