[Xapian-discuss] How does remote server work?

[Olly Betts]

On Sat, Nov 28, 2009 at 07:23:22AM -0500, Jim wrote:
> I'm concerned that there will be a performance hit if there is a large
> amount of data transferred over a slow link.  Does the actual search
> occur on the client or the server side?  If on the client side, then how
> much data is transferred?  If it's on the server side then can I assume
> that a small amount of data is pushed to the server and just the results
> returned?

A search is performed on the server and the resulting MSet serialised and
returned to the client.  If there are other sub-databases (local or
remote), the results are merged to give the final MSet.  So it should
behave fairly well on slower connections.  We also try to minimise the
number of exchanges required for the benefit of high latency connections.

If you find it is slower than you'd like, all the messages are sent and
received by the same mechanism, so you could easily dump out the message
type and size to see what is going on.

Cheers,
    Olly