[Xapian-discuss] xapian vs lucene.net

[James Aylett]

On Wed, Aug 30, 2006 at 10:59:07PM +0100, Olly Betts wrote:

> > http://www.cdlib.org/inside/projects/xtf/Search_Engine_Comparison.pdf
> 
> The report also claims Xapian leaks memory while indexing, which just
> isn't the case.  We've run the testsuite under valgrind for years and
> there are no memory leaks reported.  I also don't see unbounded growth
> in memory usage when indexing gmane.  We actually do relatively little
> explicit allocation and deallocation of memory.

We used to leak. Can't remember when, but I believe back in 2001
Richard and I spent some time trying to figure out why I was getting
enormous memory usage in some cases. No longer the case, as far as I'm
aware.

Does anyone have any clear comparisons? The ND Dewey report [1] I'm
not convinced by, as their feature set comparison feels out of date,
or at best very specific to me. It isn't really fair to compare Xapian
to swish-e; IMHO they should compare omega instead (and then have as a
pro that you get full API access through Xapian).

[1] http://dewey.library.nd.edu/mylibrary/manual/ch/ch17.html#id2564648

In terms of visibility, we're not in dmoz.org (at least, in one of the
places Lucene is). Lucene scores a *lot* better for Google "search
engine library"; we're top for "information retrieval library". That's
fixable by frobbing the front page in the way we've talked about, and
being very, very careful about phrasing :-)

James

-- 
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  James Aylett                                                  xapian.org
  james at tartarus.org                               uncertaintydivision.org