Elastic Search - Advantages + Add-on Compatibility?

[TheBigK]

I read the official documentation of Elastic Search and found that it's an ideal solution for a large board running on a dedicated server or a VPS. Our board currently has 56k threads & 260k+ posts, I'm wondering what advantages will the Elastic search will offer to our setup?

1. Remove the limit of having minimum 3 chars in searches?
2. Searches will be more faster / efficient (?)
3. Search quality will be better (?)

What else?
Is it worth the investment?
Also, I remember reading about compatability issues with few of the popular addons? Does anyone know which add-ons have issues with Elastic search?

 

[MattW]

Your board is slightly larger than mine, and I've been running ES for a couple of months now.

All 3 of your points above are why I moved over to ES.

http://xenforo.com/community/threads/xenforo-es.47322/

I'm running XenMediaGallery, Showcase, XenTag, and all 3 work perfectly with ES.

 

[TheBigK]

Thanks, Matt.

How about XenPorta?

Also, did you see any noticeable improvement in the quality of search / speed after installing the Elastic Search addon?

 

[Deepmartini]

Is elastic search just for search or does it optimize anything else on Xenforo like speed, caching, etc. of pages/posts?

 

[MattW]

I don't use XenPorta, so can't comment on that.

Search results are faster, and the quality is much better than it was before.

 

[speedway]

So how much real memory do you need to run ES? I am on a 2Gb memory/4GB burst VPS. My site currently has just under 800K posts. I was running Sphinx on my VB forum and it made a hell of a difference to the search speed.

 

[MattW]

So how much real memory do you need to run ES? I am on a 2Gb memory/4GB burst VPS. My site currently has just under 800K posts. I was running Sphinx on my VB forum and it made a hell of a difference to the search speed.

From Slavik's guide, 1GB per 1million posts:

http://xenforo.com/community/threads/how-to-basic-elasticsearch-installation-rhel-suse.26160/

However, the latest version of Enhanced Search allows you to Optimize Mapping

Optimized mappings take up less space and can return results more quickly. The option will only appear when mappings need to be optimized. It is recommended that you always ensure your mappings are optimized.

 

[speedway]

Thanks Matt. Will wait for the next advertising payment to come in and I might grab ES then to give it a try.

 

[TheBigK]

Is it true that Elastic Search takes off the load from MySQL? Does that mean all the searches like 'What's New' & general loading of threads with several pages will be significantly faster?

 

[MattW]

Is it true that Elastic Search takes off the load from MySQL? Does that mean all the searches like 'What's New' & general loading of threads with several pages will be significantly faster?

No, those results are still from the database.

ES stores the post information in it's own schema, which XF accesses to get the location of the results you are searching for. It still needs to use MySQL to get the post information back form the database.