SearchBench

SearchBench has received a couple of useful updates since yesterday's initial cloud tests. It can generate search queries based on actual content, and it can export search benchmark results. In gaining these features, it is now possible to use SearchBench to perform some actual performance comparisons.

Once again I set up these tests on an extra large EC2 instance. I still have not performed any tuning, and I continue to test Drupal 5 core search with Xapian search. My initial benchmarks show that Xapian offers a very significant 6x+ performance advantage over Drupal's core search when a given search query actually returns results. In addition, Xapian is able to index a large site in about a 3rd the time of Drupal 5's built in search. Read on for actual benchmark results and graphs.

I ran some initial Drupal search benchmarks with SearchBench on Amazon's EC2 cloud service. These first tests were primarily focused on confirming that SearchBench and EC2 are a good match. They utilized a single server instance, and did not include any server tuning.

I used the devel module to create 5,000 random nodes and 10,000 random comments. I indexed this content both with Drupal's core search module, and with the contributed Xapian module. I then used SearchBench to create 1,000 random search queries with one to ten ten words in each query, with phrasing and negation set to random. Finally, I ran the same identical search test three times in a row, comparing Xapian's performance to Drupal's core search performance. I was impressed to see how well Drupal's core search performed in these tests, and plan many more tests to better understand the strengths and weaknesses of each search technology.

There have been some ongoing scalability issues affecting Drupal.org's built in search functionality for some time now. Less interested in outsourcing search to a big black box such as Google, I spent some time helping clean up the Xapian module, making it possible to completely replace Drupal's built in SQL-powered search functionality with a Xapian powered engine. With the basic search functionality complete, there was still a need to actually compare the performance of the two solutions.

Toward this goal, over the weekend I launched a new project called SearchBench, a Drupal module for benchmarking Drupal's search performance. As the module evolves, I hope it will prove extremely useful for comparing the performance and scalability of the many free and open source search options available to Drupal powered websites.