Is there an ETA for Searchlight?

[Meeper]

Originally Posted by Floren

It should be released next week. Right now I'm performing upgrades to all current customers.


What advantage would you have, related to searching speed, if you plan to use Searchlight? The important aspect is the overall performance of your forums, not how to "tweak" the search.

Well I meant specifically with page loads, etc when referring to tweaking. With the right caching, etc setup vb4 doesn't seem too slow to me (and we are a 500-1500 concurrent user forum). The search though is rubbish.

The predicament I am in, is that we are going through a whole round of updates and improvements, including having custom mods written, etc, and we didn't want to do this on top of the 3.8. I do agree vb4 in many ways is a bit of a step back, but we decided we'd prefer to be working with that, and just make the necessary modifications as the new releases come in, then working with, in some ways, a fundamentally different script and eventually going through the vb4 move.

But that said, I do appreciate what you are saying and the work you are doing May I ask how difficult you'd presume it to be for our coders to port your searchlight intermediary, until you do decide to support it, from your own opinion.

[Floren]

Searchlight is not a search solution, but an application that that allows you to use Sphinx as a second MySQL server and manipulate the stored data through 2 type of communications (API and SQL). It is software independent, so you can use it with any program out there.

As an example, I created a vBulletin product that easily demonstrates how simple it is to use Searchlight as an efficient alternative to their current search engine. This is something that reflects only 1% of the power Searchlight can open in front of your programming hands. For example, you can say goodbye to all table locks because you could execute those heavy queries through Searchlight.

Back to your question, it is up to your coders to see how they can implement the API or the MySQL binary network protocol classes to replace the current crippled search in vBulletin 4. If I create a vBulletin 4 product, I will use the current OOP classes that cover everything related to processing data and just create 2 additional classes that will take care of the error handling/results.

The current structure is very simple:
1. User performs a search query.
3. Search processing is initialized by a class that acts as bridge between Searchlight Core files and vBulletin files.
2. Response is processed through Searchlight Search classes.
4. Query results are sent back to user, through default vBulletin request.

Of course, all this is done with no file or template edits.