XenForo Enhanced Search - Good idea?

[AndreaMarucci]

I'm thinking about buying XenForo Enhanced Search since the standard XF search is not good and, maybe, this one is better.

What are the main advantages installing XenForo Enhanced Search? My board is not so big (about 260.000 posts) but I'm searching for something that gave me better results when someone search for something in my board.

I've read that it requires elasticsearch that I really don't know. It's something I've to ask to my service provider to install on my server? It's free? Does it impact my server's performance? I've a dedicated server where my board run with many other domains so I've full access to my server.

Thanks for your suggestions...

 

[rv65]

Yes, Elastic search is free and I know that popular distros have it in their repositories, and if your distro does not have it, there is a tar.gz file that can be compiled. Either have your host install it, or you can install it yourself if they let you install such programs. From what I have read, it does take up extra resources, but not exactly sure. I know some big board owners could chime in, for exact numbers.

 

[AndreaMarucci]

Hoping that someone will reply to have some more info...

 

[Mike]

You can find more info about Elasticsearch here: https://www.elastic.co/ It needs to be installed on the server and then XenForo will connect to it (like MySQL). Elasticsearch will use some additional memory, though you're removing the search index from MySQL so you get some savings there. For a forum your size, Elasticsearch would probably use around 100MB for its index (though I think it will want to allocate a minimum of 256MB).

You'll get better results with XF Enhanced Search because there isn't a word length limit (MySQL defaults to a minimum word length of 4, though it can be changed) and because we can do relevancy-based ordering. It does also tend to be significantly faster, though with 250,000 posts this probably won't be obvious in most cases.

 

[Eagle]

Yes I would highly recommend it to anyone using Elasticsearch and we're using Elasticsearch in our forums. Sure that is awesome to use for performance, database usage, search usage (as many of our forums users are aware.), etc. The whole point of Elasticsearch is to allow you to, well, search.

 

[AndreaMarucci]

Thanks to everybody, I'll check with my provider about installing elasticsearch and, if ok, I'll buy the license for the enhanced search...