As I have mentioned in my previous post, I have started using Sphinx as a search engine on my site. It was a very exciting week for my site with a record breaking number of visitors. Sphinx has handled it great. I must say that MySQL full text search have done a great job too. There was some slow queries before, but after adding 1GB of RAM memory couple months ago, I really haven’t experienced any major problems with MySQL full text search. But I have realized that I would have to switch to some better search engine sooner or later.

Sphinx has replaced MySQL full text search successfully. Search is very fast and the CPU usage is lower even with the increasing number of visits. Not only that I don’t use MySQL fulltext for searching, but the removing full text indexes surely helped the CPU, since it doesn’t have to constantly update fulltext indexes on each update. Instead, I have implemented Sphinx main+delta scheme for re-indexing. Main index is re-indexed nightly while the delta index is rebuilt every 15 minutes.

So far, so good…