According to this wiki:
https://wiki.apache.org/solr/NearRealtimeSearch
the commitWithin is a soft-commit by default. Soft-commits are very efficient in terms of making the added documents immediately searchable. But! They are not on the disk yet. That means the documents are being committed into RAM. In this setup you would use updateLog to be solr instance crash tolerant.
What you do in point 2 is hard-commit, i.e. flush the added documents to disk. Doing this after each document add is very expensive. So instead, post a bunch of documents and issue a hard commit or even have you autoCommit set to some reasonable value, like 10 min or 1 hour (depends on your user expectations).