Elasticsearch / Enhanced Search for smaller boards - useful?

[Ryan Mitchell]

I'm using Xenforo for my company's internal board which is expanding to include external users as well. That said, it will not be a large board for a long long time - I'm guessing under 1000 hits a day, if that. The cost for enhanced search is really not that big of a deal to add greater search capability, control, or speedier results.

However, is there any benefit for smaller boards using Elasticsearch over the fulltext MySQL capability?

 

[gordy]

Good question, I'm curious also, what exactly does it do and why better?

What additional features are there ?

As with many other things developers run with the assumption forum admins and biz folk know why we need it already, and make a poor case for selling it.

 

[Ryan Mitchell]

I think it's clear it's more performant for larger sites than MySQL fulltext search. Highly customizable, purpose-built, memory-oriented (if you let it be), so it's great for large boards - I got that message loud and clear. What I'm wondering is if it's also valuable for smaller boards - or if the value is purely performance for a large data set.

 

[Jake Bunce]

Elasticsearch is more scalable (good for very large forums) and it has no minimum word length and it supports stemming (automatic searching of variations on a root word like date, dates, dating, etc).

 

[Ryan Mitchell]

Okay, so there are at least a couple of reasons beyond just support for larger boards. So it sounds like it might be a good addition for smaller boards as well. Thanks, Jake!

 

[Dakis]

How big is a big forum to benefit from the Enhanced Search? I've got around half a million posts, getting improvement in search would be great - would this qualify?

 

[CTXMedia]

I currently use it on my largest board - but plan to slowly add it to the smaller ones as funds allow; specifically because of the stemming and no min. word lenght (which I've manually set to 3 in MySQL anyway).

If you can easily afford it, have the server resources to run it, and like the idea of the additional features - then there's no real reason why you shouldn't use it for a board of any size.