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Open Source Search Engine Benchmarks
Sean Fargo writes "This article has benchmarks for the latest versions of Lucene, Xapian, zettair, sqlite, and sphinx. It tests them by indexing Twitter and Medical Journals, providing comparative system stats and relevancy scores. All the benchmark code is open source."
Nothing else to say, really
Really? Am I the only person that found it interesting that Lucene, the only non C/C++ implementation, gave some pretty impressive stats? I mean, it's written in Java and although it has a slower index time its search time, index size and relevancy are impressive.
I may have to poke around in the Lucene code after work tonight to figure out what kind of strange majick those Apache developers employ. Hopefully I'll walk away with some extra spells in my bag.
My work here is dung.
Okay so the fastest engine is using Lucerne, a Java search engine, and this is neither tuned nor horizontally scaled (which it can do very well).
C++ and C both fail to deliver the same level of performance as the Java virtual machine.
Oh wait hang on... does this mean that for complex applications the most important performance piece is normally actually the efficiency of the code rather than the efficiency of the base platform and therefore having a language in which it is easier to write efficient code is better than just having the one that is fastest to execute a for loop?
But hell this is Slashdot and Java is Slooooooow...
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Really? Am I the only person that found it interesting that Lucene, the only non C/C++ implementation, gave some pretty impressive stats?
Is it really that big a surprise? Given that some of the largest, most information-heavy sites on the Internet (e.g. Wikipedia) use it for their internal search?
Really? Am I the only person that found it interesting that Lucene, the only non C/C++ implementation, gave some pretty impressive stats? I mean, it's written in Java and although it has a slower index time its search time, index size and relevancy are impressive.
Lucene is a great search tool. As TFA pointed out, however, if you're looking for a "search solution" rather than "search engine" then you should check out Solr instead. Lucene is a toolkit that you build on top of, not something you really want to deploy by itself. Solr is that thing built on top of Lucene.
Be aware that while Lucene/Solr has made terrific progress, it is not quite in the "enterprise search" category. For superscale implementations you'll still likely need to look at a high-priced product like FAST.
All the other search engines except lucene are written in C/C++. Why didn't Vik Singh test also CLucene (http://sourceforge.net/projects/clucene/)?
Here is the CLucene's description on SourceForce: "CLucene is a C++ port of Lucene: the high-performance, full-featured text search engine written in Java. CLucene is faster than lucene as it is written in C++."
But Wikipedia's internal search is the suckiest thing that ever sucked! Seriously, does anyone use it, instead of just sticking "wikipedia" into their Google search?
Solr/Lucene power a number of sites that would be in the enterprise search category (Apple, Netflix, C-Net). Where I work, we index 5 million docs in Solr/Lucne and serve out millions of search requests a day. It's not google scale, but most people don't need that. The markets where one needs a FAST are dwindling quickly.
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice, in practice there is.
Ah, thank you. So indeed, an implementation of the same algorithm turns out to be _three times_ as fast in C++ than it is in Java (see here).
I wonder if eldavojohn wishes to comment on that?