Comparing Xapian and Drupal 5's Core Search

Jeremy — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 02:09:53 +0000

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. These tests make it clear that it's important to use legitimate search terms when benchmarking search performance. SearchBench's new ability to extract wordlists from a site's actual content allows the tool to provide much more useful data. Again, note that neither Xapian nor MySQL has been tuned for these results, and that future benchmarks will aim to better understand how various tunings and configurations affect search performance...

Jeremy Wed, 07/09/2008 - 19:09

SearchBench In The Cloud

Jeremy — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 06:56:29 +0000

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. In this test, Drupal's core search functionality outperformed Xapian search by about 15%. The three Xapian tests took a total of ~559 seconds, with the first taking ~192 seconds, the second taking ~188 seconds, and the third taking ~180 seconds. The three core search tests took a total of ~505...

Jeremy Tue, 07/08/2008 - 23:56