I have had to fix a few issues with AAF in order to get it working well for myself in a production environment. I'm using the latest "release" version which is 0.4.1:
1) When there is no index in place, every request starts a new rebuild. While there is some code in place to allow this to happen during testing, personally I see no reason to even test for this, although maybe it's necessary for those using multiple indexes (?). At the very least, the same index should never be built twice at the same time I hope, so I put in rudimentary code that just locks until the index is complete on a request. The real problem is that all the rebuilds use the same FERRET_INDEX/ rebuild path, which causes the dRB server to core dump and massive CPU load as two reindexes are running and files are replaced underneath them. This may be the reason for a lot of stability complaints, as I think a lot of people just remove their index instead of calling rebuild. 2) Performance degrades when I index articles until I call optimize on the index. Optimize can take many seconds and seems to lock all access via the dRb server. I added logic to use a separate index for modifications (adds/deletes) and optimizations. It required significant hacking of the AAF plug-in. I basically have a writable index that is then copied each time to a new read-only index location, followed by changing the index_dir in AAF to the new read- only index. This prevents the slowdown during indexing, but everything still seems to lock during optimizations. I have a faster server now, so optimizations only take around 6 seconds. I may have to use a separate dRb server to do the optimizations. I am not sure where this locking occurs. I would like to see aaf take take or this locking issue somehow. None of the above are ready to be checked in publicly but I'd be happy to send a patch if someone wants to base some work on it. Other than these issues, aaf/ferret have been excellent, and basically "just worked". I am able to handle around 40 requests per second, including rendering a results page. I haven't finished performance testing as that is more than enough performance for me right now. -Alex _______________________________________________ Ferret-talk mailing list [email protected] http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ferret-talk
