Comments on: Cross-model searching in Rails with Ferret

By: Tom Armitage

Tom Armitage — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 10:35:18 +0000

That’s great news, Nasir. Glad to know it’s an improvement.

By: Nasir

Nasir — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 08:18:57 +0000

A follow up to my previous comment:

So I implemented Sphinx with Ultrasphinx on http://www.SPhred.com a couple of days back and so far I didn’t receive any error notification emails as opposed to receiving over 10 every day due to indexing problems when I was using Ferret.

As of now, Sphinx looks better compared to Ferret :)

By: Nasir

Nasir — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 12:37:57 +0000

I think tom is right. It was OK in production when data on SPhred wasn’t that huge but as traffic increased thus data as well then it started giving errors very often, more specifically like this one

File Not Found Error occured at :117 in xpop_context Error occured in fs_store.c:329 – fs_open_input tried to open “/path_to/index/production/item/_br_1.del” but it doesn’t exist:

Our users think it is some coding issue though it is just ferret messing up.

Now I am looking for options but haven’t decided on anything yet.

Is Sphinx / Ultraphinx reliable enough? Any idea on Solr?

By: Tom

Tom — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 15:19:24 +0000

Hey Simon, glad you found it useful. I'm not sure that I'd recommend Ferret for production use any momre, based on other people's experiences to date. If you're interested in a fast, efficient, and powerful search engine for your Rails application, I can recommend Sphinx in combination with the excellent Ultrasphinx plugin. The performance boost is quite remarkable.

By: Simon Jones

Simon Jones — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 08:06:37 +0000

(Website due up soon, that’s what I’m working on)

Thanks for the excellent tips, been really helpful!

Tried out the code suggested by your colleague and there is just one change that’s required. Because find_id_by_contents returns an array with the total results, followed by the actual results, like [5, [] ] you need to change the line:

k.find_id_by_contents(query).each do

k.find_id_by_contents(query).last.each do

By: Infovore : More on multi-model search with acts_as_ferret

Infovore : More on multi-model search with acts_as_ferret — Sun, 24 Sep 2006 21:39:37 +0000

[...] September 2006 0 comments So, Matt pointed out that when you do things like tha [...]

By: Matt Biddulph

Matt Biddulph — Sat, 23 Sep 2006 00:13:26 +0000

Looks good… I’ve been meaning to try out ferret and will do so soon.

Worth keeping in mind: In the acts_as_ferret find_id_by_contents RDoc that says “Note that the scores retrieved this way arenâ€™t normalized across indexes, so that the order of results after sorting by score will differ from the order you would get when running the same query on a single index” — http://projects.jkraemer.net/acts_as_ferret/rdoc/classes/FerretMixin/Acts/ARFerret/ClassMethods.html#M000015