AVForums moves to Xenforo

I'm pretty sure Shawn at DP said he prefers some parts of ES over Sphynx. I can't remember if he prefers it overall but certainly he sees some benefits.

He can't respond right now of course but I'll see if I can find the post.
 
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Chris D said:
I'm pretty sure Shawn at DP said he prefers some parts of ES over Sphynx. I can't remember if he prefers it overall but certainly he sees some benefits.

He can't respond right now of course but I'll see if u can find the post.
Click to expand...
digitalpoint said:
I honestly think you might have something misconfigured.

My biggest worry about my vBulletin -> XenForo migration was replacing Sphinx search with Elastic Search. I'm running more or less a stock ES setup (not doing any "warming" of indexes or anything else). And for the searches since ES was started (1,002,361 queries), the average search time is 0.0376 seconds overall. Compare this to Sphinx search, which was also fast (the average was ~0.08 seconds). This is with 21,978,245 searchable documents, and they were the same searchable content that I had on Sphinx.

I'm fairly qualified as an expert with Sphinx (I was the one that built the Sphinx search that pretty much every big board uses on vBulletin 4): https://marketplace.digitalpoint.com/sphinx-search-for-vbulletin-4.870/item

All that being said there are some things I prefer about Sphinx, and there are also some things I like better in ES vs. Sphinx. I don't like that Elastic Search takes about 50% more memory for indexes... for us Sphinx took 4.16GB, ES with the same data takes 7.64GB (more on that here).

If it takes anything more than a fraction of a second for stuff to be indexed with Elastic Search, your server most definitely has something abnormal going on.

You are welcome to try out searching stuff here to see how ES handles your queries: https://forums.digitalpoint.com/

Like I said, it's more or less an untuned/standard ES setup that doesn't even bother to warm the indexes.
Click to expand...

digitalpoint said:
No... I didn't have anything to do with Sphinx on vB3... just vB4.

I'm not in disagreement with you... there are basically 2 things I don't like about Elastic Search. The memory requirements (but it's certainly not double or exponentially higher than Sphinx... but less is always better with memory as far as I'm concerned). My bigger issue is I don't particularly care for it running on Java either. But bottom line is for what it's doing (returning search results), it's about twice as fast as Sphinx at doing that (which still seems super strange to me with how that can even be... but it is for whatever reason).

I was actually figuring that once I was live on XenForo, I'd be making my own Sphinx-based search... but truthfully, I just haven't seen a need yet. As for the couple things I like better about Sphinx, there's just as many (if not more) things I ended up liking better in Elastic Search...

  • Schema-less makes it so when you add new content types for search (for example resource manager), you don't need to define specific search indexes like you do in Sphinx
  • Elastic Search is faster at returning search results (again, I still find this strange, but for me it's been the case)
  • Sphinx is weird with how it internally handles document IDs, so you have to pre-allocate certain blocks of document IDs for each content type
  • Sharding/clustering multiple nodes is nothing short of amazing in Elastic Search

Coming from ME (the guy that made the Sphinx search for vB4), it's saying something... especially because I was so skeptical of using Elastic Search after being on Sphinx for years.

That being said... the new versions of Sphinx are looking pretty nice. 2.1 has support for schema-less indexes: http://sphinxsearch.com/blog/2013/02/07/sphinx-2-1-json-attributes/

If they work out node discovery/auto-sharding/clustering to work more like it does in Elastic Search, I might consider making a Sphinx search for XenForo. But as it is right now, I see the current version of Sphinx more or less on par with Elastic Search overall.
Click to expand...
 
I have to admit I am quite impressed with this forums in general. I love the layout and the way you have things in easy to use categories. I love the navigation bar as it doesn't take away from the over all layout and theme.
 
digitalpoint said:
I'm not in disagreement with you... there are basically 2 things I don't like about Elastic Search. The memory requirements (but it's certainly not double or exponentially higher than Sphinx... but less is always better with memory as far as I'm concerned). My bigger issue is I don't particularly care for it running on Java either. But bottom line is for what it's doing (returning search results), it's about twice as fast as Sphinx at doing that (which still seems super strange to me with how that can even be... but it is for whatever reason).
Click to expand...

Hehehe....I am surprised Shawn said this. He answered his own wondering why ES is faster than Sphinx in his comment about its memory requirements over Sphinx. Using more RAM is the simple answer to the price you always have to pay for better application performance.;)

Scott
 
20million posts... twenttyyyy milliooonnn... how does that happen :)

Love your forum. Frequent lurker...

@Stuart Wright
Are you using a custom version of showcase addon for the reviews or is it built from scratch?
 
Norman said:
I'd like to ask this too, seriously, as I have a general Italian community (still on vB 3) and I'd like to make it "big".
Click to expand...
What worked for us may not work for you, so I don't think my advice will be very useful. For a start, we launched in 2000 when the Internet was younger. We've had 16 years to grow.
The things we did which made us grow were
  • Being the first dedicated home cinema forum in the UK (there were similar ones but not specific to home cinema).
  • Being the forum for the websites of several (niche but) popular magazines. I ran the magazines (in exchange for keeping the ad revenue) for years while holding down a job meaning I worked 16 hours a day, 7 days a week for several years with no holidays. That definitely gave the forums a boost.
  • Making the forums welcoming, spam free and family friendly.
  • Having a topic (e.g. home electronics) which attracts advertisers. A busy forum will need revenue to pay for servers and staff.
  • Striving to be better than the competition.
  • Having a strong and dedicated moderation team.
  • Having a strong, expert editorial section which attracts readers, commands respect and connects us with advertisers.
  • Working on the site as a full time job ASAP and then 7am to 9pm, 7 days a week (with breaks when we need/want them, of course).
Those are the ones which come to mind.
 
Stuart Wright said:
What worked for us may not work for you, so I don't think my advice will be very useful. For a start, we launched in 2000 when the Internet was younger. We've had 16 years to grow.
The things we did which made us grow were
  • Being the first dedicated home cinema forum in the UK (there were similar ones but not specific to home cinema).
  • Being the forum for the websites of several (niche but) popular magazines. I ran the magazines (in exchange for keeping the ad revenue) for years while holding down a job meaning I worked 16 hours a day, 7 days a week for several years with no holidays. That definitely gave the forums a boost.
  • Making the forums welcoming, spam free and family friendly.
  • Having a topic (e.g. home electronics) which attracts advertisers. A busy forum will need revenue to pay for servers and staff.
  • Striving to be better than the competition.
  • Having a strong and dedicated moderation team.
  • Having a strong, expert editorial section which attracts readers, commands respect and connects us with advertisers.
  • Working on the site as a full time job ASAP and then 7am to 9pm, 7 days a week (with breaks when we need/want them, of course).
Those are the ones which come to mind.
Click to expand...
Those who dream shall lose. Those who work shall achieve. :) - "Robust"

feel free to submit to bestquotes.com at any time, credit to robust, ty
 
Stuart Wright said:
What worked for us may not work for you, so I don't think my advice will be very useful. For a start, we launched in 2000 when the Internet was younger. We've had 16 years to grow.
The things we did which made us grow were [...]
Click to expand...

Thank you so much for your reply, Stuart. I really appreciated it!
 
Stuart Wright said:
What worked for us may not work for you, so I don't think my advice will be very useful. For a start, we launched in 2000 when the Internet was younger. We've had 16 years to grow.
Click to expand...

Your list is similar to one of the big boards I manage. The main forum topic and discussions slowly grew over the past 13 years to where ours comes up near the top of search results for various popular subjects of ours. It took about five years to hit our stride, then it really snowballed.

Many think there is a magic wand to make a forum popular. There isn't one, beyond having a niche topic and putting in a lot of hard, patient work. Even worse is that line of thinking that "forums are dying" when in my experience the opposite is true. Members in all of our forums want to get away from the general dumbing down of the Internet (*cough* social media *cough*) and go somewhere to engage in meaningful, intelligent discussion. Due to there being some forums similar forums to ours that are doing similarly well, and also growing, it tells me that forums still have more to offer than any other medium out there at the moment.
 

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