I currently use Sphinx Search for alot of website on my web server, and have about 30-40 different indexes. As you can imagine this can make for a very long sphinx config file.
(40 lines per index) X (30 indexes) = 1200 lines - alot to have in one file.
I learnt this nifty trick from the sphinx search forum. You can use any command line scripting language (BASH,PHP,etc) and then include config files from another directory.
posted by Mark Willis
As with more and more developers, i've always faced a problem with MySQL's FULLTEXT search. As soon as you get over 100-200Mb table and try and do a BOOLEAN search on a keyword field, performance seems to fall out the window.
For Example:
SELECT id FROM listing WHERE MATCH ( keywords ) AGAINST ( 'plumbers' IN BOOLEAN MODE )
Rows: 2,913 total, Query took 0.3789 sec
This was run on a 500k row table, containing 180Mb data.
Sphinx Search makes FULLTEXT searching much simpler and quicker.
Once you download it and get it installed (I have been running it in linux environments: Cent OS and ubuntu), you modify the main config file to setup your desired indexes. You then start the search daemon and away you go.
How it works:
posted by Mark Willis
