[Xapian-discuss] DFS solution

[Olly Betts]

On Tue, Jul 10, 2007 at 09:56:36AM +0100, James Aylett wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 09, 2007 at 12:20:08PM -0700, Andrey wrote:
> 
> > I am currently doing some research on running xapian on Distributed
> > File Sysyem(DFS), try to find some cheap solution to scale up the
> > storage, and, without any luck...

I've not tried running Xapian on a distributed file system, so I can't
really comment there.  I'd certainly be interested to hear any
experiences you have.

If your aim is to scale to a lot of traffic rather than enormous
databases, then simply replicating the search boxes and having some sort
of load balancing is probably the lowest overhead approach.  If you're
replicating widely, you need to consider how the system will handle a
box which crashes.

> In general though, providing a file system has normal unix semantics,
> Xapian should run over it.

One important requirement is that fcntl locking is supported.  E.g. NFS
without lockd doesn't work (you should get an error explaining this).

Cheers,
    Olly