[Xapian-discuss] Searching log files?

[Paul Boddie]

Kevin Duraj wrote:
> I have only one hard disk and little memory that is why I use Xapian
> on my own server.  Xapian runs very smoothly, stable  and fast that is
> why I recommend to use it only on your own server.
>   

What's "little memory" for you? I thought having 2GB for various things 
was plenty until someone told me that their laptop had 8GB. That put 
everything into perspective.

> Lucene on other side is much better when you building search engine
> for someone else, because is slow, leaking memory, crashing left and
> right, Lucene 3.0 is not compatible with Lucene 2.4 and many other
> related problems will keeps you employed. You will be always working
> your time with Lucene index optimization, merging, debugging trying to
> figure out why indexing and searching is so slow. It is a great search
> engine to keep you employed.
>   

I haven't used Lucene 3.0, but my experience with Lucene 2.x (via 
PyLucene) was that it was fairly quick and that the indexes were compact 
after optimisation. Now, I haven't been doing real-time updates since 
that isn't a requirement in my work, and I can imagine that Xapian's 
index is probably better for such things (although Lucene 3.0 was 
supposed to address this, I believe), but I never found indexing and 
searching performance to be a problem. My main reason for moving from 
Lucene was that PyLucene became even more awkward to build. Another good 
thing about Xapian is that in the last three years or so, the Python 
bindings became a lot more usable.

Paul