Entries tagged 'Meilisearch'

I am either really good at making Oracle Cloud Infrastructure instances fall over, or the VM.Standard.E2.1.Micro shape is even more under-powered than I expected. I had been using the Ubuntu “minimal” image as my base, so I thought I would try the Oracle Linux 8 image and I couldn’t even get it to run yum check-update without that process getting killed. That seems like a less-than-ideal experience out of the box.

What seems to happen on the instances (with Ubuntu) that I am using to host this site is that if something does too much I/O, the load average spikes, and things slowly grind through before recovering. The problem is that something like “running composer” seems to be too much I/O, which makes it awkward to deploy code.

Another thing that seems to get out of control quickly is when I reindex the site with Meilisearch. Considering there is very little data being indexed, that obviously shouldn’t be causing any sort of trouble. I have two instances spun up now, so I can play with the settings on one without temporarily choking off the live site. It’s probably just a matter of setting the maximum indexing memory in Meilisearch’s configuration or constraining the memory on that container.

I also added a OCI Flexible Network Load Balancer in front of my instance so I can quickly switch things over to another without waiting on any DNS propagation. Maybe if Ampere instances ever become available in my region I will play around with splitting the deployment across multiple instances.

Elasticsearch is something I have seen pop up in a lot of job listings, so I decided to play around with it to see if I could use it for the search on this site. I was able to get it set up fairly easily on my development server and shift over to using it there, but when I tried to bring it up on my production server, I ran into the problem that it is more resource-hungry than it can handle. This all runs on a Nanode, which is Linode’s tiniest virtual server that just has 1GB of RAM.

Right now I am using Sphinx which has been fine, but it hasn’t really been open source for quite a while.

I was going to try playing around with ZincSearch next. I was digging into it and it certainly sounds similar to what I want (a “lightweight alternative to Elasticsearch that requires minimal resources”) but it isn’t clear how active the project is or what sort of future it has. The documentation for ZincSearch is pretty but kind of scant. Looking into the search types it supports, I was left with questions about what syntax the querystring type actually supported. So I looked at the code (which is slow reading since I am still fairly unfamiliar with Go), which I followed to the underlying bluge indexing library, which has even less documentation. I finally figured out that bluge was forked from bleve (which seems like something that would be nice to mention in the README for bluge, but whatever). Bleve has the query string format documented. (Whew.)

But after all of that digging, I’m less certain about how much time I want to put into playing with ZincSearch since the underpinnings and their future seem shaky.

Typesense or Meilisearch is on my list to give a try next.

But in case it isn’t obvious, the things I have been digging into are sort of scattered right now.