May 19, 2013

Sphinx search performance optimization: multi-threaded search

Queries in MySQL, Sphinx and many other database or search engines are typically single-threaded. That is when you issue a single query on your brand new r910 with 32 CPU cores and 16 disks, the maximum that is going to be used to process this query at any given point is 1 CPU core and [...]

Sphinx search performance optimization: attribute-based filters

One of the most common causes of a poor Sphinx search performance I find our customers face is misuse of search filters. In this article I will cover how Sphinx attributes (which are normally used for filtering) work, when they are a good idea to use and what to do when they are not, but [...]

Webinar for Full Text Search Throwdown

Tomorrow, August 22 at 10:00am PDT, I’ll present a webinar called Full Text Search Throwdown.  This is a no-nonsense performance comparison of solutions for full text indexing for MySQL applications, including: LIKE predicates and regular expressions MyISAM FULLTEXT indexes InnoDB FULLTEXT indexes Apache Solr Sphinx Search Trigraphs I’ll compare the performance for building indexes and querying [...]

First Sphinx Conference is Announced

The First ever Sphinx Users Conference is announced to take place in Moscow, Russia on October 24th, which is the Sunday before Highload.ru conference, so if you’re attending that you may just drop by to this event too. this is going to be free technically focused event, close in spirit to Percona Performance Conference, we [...]

Slides from my Sphinx talk at RIT++ 2010

While the majority of Percona gang travelled to California for the MySQL event of the year, I headed in the opposite direction to Moscow for RIT++ 2010 conference where I presented a talk on Sphinx. You can get the PDF file here – Improving MySQL-based applications performance with Sphinx.     I have been invited [...]

Sphinx 0.9.9 is finally here.

Sphinx 0.9.9 is finally released to General Availability. The previous version 0.9.9-rc2 was released back in April so there was quite a gap. This release fixes about 40 bugs which are mostly rare or insignificant. Fixing bugs in 0.9.9 was smaller portion of work done in Sphinx during last half a year – 0.9.9-rc2 was [...]

Talking MySQL to Sphinx

In the recently released Sphinx version 0.9.9-rc2 there is a support for MySQL wire protocol and SphinxQL – SQL-like language to query Sphinx indexes. This support is currently in its early preview stage but it is still fun to play with. A thing to mention – unlike MySQL Storage Engines, some of which as InfoBright [...]

Percona’s patches spread to a wider audience

Percona’s patches are now available to a wider audience via OurDelta, a community effort to provide  builds with features (Percona patches, Google patches, etc) and storage engines (PBXT, Sphinx, etc) that aren’t in the main MySQL server. Arjen Lentz is really the brainchild behind this. Kudos Arjen! What does this mean for the Percona patches? [...]

Slides from Egypt talks

I published slides from my two talks from our Egypt company meeting. First one is about Sphinx search engine. The originally presentation was prepared by Andrew Aksenoff, author of Sphinx for HighLoad.ru conference, I translated it on English for our meeting. And second about Mercurial version system, the tool we decided to use for our [...]