Hi! On Fri, Nov 16, 2007 at 12:19:10PM -0500, Stuart Sierra wrote: [..] > For a different perspective: I'm in the middle of switching from > Ferret to Solr. I like Ferret a lot, and still use it on several > sites, but I had some problems with one large site: > > 1. the patches for large-index support are still in development;
Let's hope Dave reads this ;-) However there are several sites I know of with Index sizes > several GB, so they seem to be working well enough. > 2. each update to Ferret requires rebuilding the index; This for sure is annoying but I'd consider this normal for a library that has developed that fast. I think Dave has had very good reasons for each of the changes he did to the index format. Plus I don't think *every* release had a new index format ;-) > 3. Ferret doesn't yet support compressed indexes. At least from the docs it looks like it does, see http://ferret.davebalmain.com/api/classes/Ferret/Index/FieldInfo.html . I didn't ever try this out however. > My other reason for switching is that Rails' ActiveRecord is not > well-suited to storing large documents, which made acts_as_ferret less > compelling. That's a good point, and we plan to make aaf independent from active_record in the future. > I was nervous about tackling Solr, but I've found it quite easy to > use, and the built-in caching and multithreading make it fast. numbers, please :-) > I think Ferret is adequate for most search tasks, but if (like me) > you're building a dedicated search engine, Solr is currently a > stronger candidate. Well, As Solr uses Lucene internally, the mechanics and performance characteristics naturally can't be that different from Ferret. Maybe Ferret has a bug or two and a non-working inter-process locking (which doesn't matter when you think about building a dedicated search server like Solr is, since it's only one process), but the general internal handling of the index is the same, i.e. you can also only have one Writer open to a Lucene index at a time, and Searchers won't see index changes until re-opened, too. Having that said, if my application's main concern would be search, I most probably wouldn't choose any pre-cooked solution like aaf or Solr, but build exactly the thing I need from scratch, basing it either on Lucene or Ferret. But maybe that's just me ;-) Cheers, Jens -- Jens Krämer http://www.jkraemer.net/ - Blog http://www.omdb.org/ - The new free film database _______________________________________________ Ferret-talk mailing list [email protected] http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ferret-talk
