Comments on: Searching Boards.ie – Solr, EC2, SQS, SNS, Node.js

By: Munin plugins for Solr | Ross Duggan

Munin plugins for Solr | Ross Duggan — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 21:20:57 +0000

[…] been mucking around with Python recently and have written a couple of simple Munin plugins for Boards.ie’s Solr cluster (in the hope of helping to track down some annoying performance […]

By: Ross

Ross — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 22:03:05 +0000

Hi Alex, thanks!

You’re right in that it’s tricky to compare the two, but I’ll see if I can dig up some numbers either for the next post or as an update to this one.

The ranking is based on a mixture of post time, how prominent the search terms are (spread out in the body or tightly coupled in the title), number of responses, “thanks” and views. It’s not actually a particularly complicated blend but seems to turn up pretty reliable results. Plans are to tweak it occasionally, attempt to add more information to the scoring, etc.

There’s a pretty comprehensive FAQ on the Solr wiki; it was close to hieroglyphics the first time I read it but makes a lot more sense now. I’d like to give a quick run through in a future post.

By: Alex Staveley

Alex Staveley — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 21:50:06 +0000

A super article. Well done. What would be really interesting is to hear some performance metrics. For example, searching X number of records in MySQL takes this whereas using Solr it takes this. I appreciate it may not really be apples with apples as I assume both are running on different spec hardware. Also what would also be really interesting would to be hear some info on the algorithm you’re using to determine what’s the best hit, second best hit, third best hit. I presume it’s a mixture of time and number of times key phrases match.

Very good stuff though. Well done.