On 8/3/06, David Balmain <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On 8/3/06, Jordan Frank <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > In the documentation, it says that optimize "should only be called > > when the index will no longer be updated very often, but will be read > > a lot". Does this mean it actually has a detrimental impact on updates > > and inserts? > > Hi Jordan, > > Optimizing the index won't effect inserts and will actually make > updates a little faster. The problem is the time it takes to optimize > the index. Optimization is an expensive process so it should be > avoided when doing a lot of indexing. > > > In my project there will be many more reads than updates, > > but there will still be a lot of updates. So should I be calling > > Optimize once a day or something like that, during a low traffic time, > > or is that going to make updates slower? > > The only detrimental performance impact optimizing has is the time it > takes to actually perform the optimization. > > > What are your recommendations > > for optimizing the index for a high-traffic site? Does optimizing the > > index lock the index for a fair period of time if there are 100s of > > thousands of documents? Will read requests be denied during the > > optimization process? > > Yes, optimization can hold the lock for a long period of time, but an > IndexWriter has a write-lock open on the index the whole time it is > open. The IndexWriter won't effect the performance of IndexReaders. > You can have as many processes as you like reading the index at the > same time and it won't matter how you are writing to the index. You > should keep in mind that the IndexReaders need to be refreshed (closed > and opened again) to make use of latest data added to the index. The > Index class can be setup to handle this for you but if you are > concerned about performance you should stick to using the IndexWriter > and IndexReader classes or at least understand how the Index class > makes use of those two classes (check out the Ruby source for the > Index class). > > So the basic answer to your question is; optimize whenever you have > the cpu cycles available to perform the opimization process. > Optimizing the index won't negatively effect the performance of the > index in any way. > > Please let me know if I haven't been clear on anything. > > Cheers, > Dave > _______________________________________________ > Ferret-talk mailing list > [email protected] > http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ferret-talk >
Crystal clear, thank you very much. I definitely intend on getting more into the internals of Ferret to understand how it really works, but for now I need to get something going quickly, so your answer is just what I needed. Right now I'm really just using acts_as_ferret but modifying it slightly so that the updates get queued and then all happen periodically, instead of when a record is updated...Eventually I would like to bypass acts_as_ferret altogether (not that it isn't a great tool, I just want to have more control) and use Ferret directly. Thanks for your help. -- Cheers, Jordan Frank [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Ferret-talk mailing list [email protected] http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ferret-talk
