[Beta] Sphinx search for phpBB 1.0.beta2

naderman · Post by **naderman** » Mon Apr 07, 2008 10:34 am

Ah alright, I'll look into that, thanks.

yais · Post by **yais** » Fri Apr 25, 2008 10:20 pm

I dont quite understand exactly how to install and integrate sphinx with phpbb3.

Can anyone explain?

thanks

xenador · Post by **xenador** » Sat Apr 26, 2008 2:58 am

from what it sounds like you have to have the sphinx installed on your server (generally compiled with apache etc...) then you have to allow it to index your board via an option in the acp, after that it should work. although this isn't even in its beta's yet...so for anything besides testing for development I probably wouldn't use it.

canadaka · Post by **canadaka** » Fri May 16, 2008 9:03 am

this looks very interesting, I was reading about Sphinx so I did a search here and found this thread.

Some questions, if using Sphinx does that mean both the phpbb native search tables and the mysql fulltext indexs will remain empty?

Also will this mod care what platform Sphinx is running on? I run Windows Server/IIS, there is a Sphinx windows binary.

And finally, any updates on this progressing from alpha status?

naderman · Post by **naderman** » Fri May 16, 2008 9:17 am

canadaka wrote:Some questions, if using Sphinx does that mean both the phpbb native search tables and the mysql fulltext indexs will remain empty?

Yes

canadaka wrote:Also will this mod care what platform Sphinx is running on? I run Windows Server/IIS, there is a Sphinx windows binary.

I've only tested it on Linux myself. I'd be happy if you could try it on Windows and report problems on the bug tracker: http://code.phpbb.com/projects/11/issues

canadaka wrote:And finally, any updates on this progressing from alpha status?

It's on my todo list but I'm not currently able to give a date.

laric · Post by **laric** » Thu Sep 04, 2008 12:12 pm

Hello,

I'd like to revive a bit this thread... Are there any news ?

I'm running a pretty large forum (5 183 988 messages, 260 528 threads and about 100 000 users)
http://www.homecinema-fr.com/forum/

We are using phpbb since the early ages and had always strugle with the rather poor search/indexing tool.

I have successfully compiled and added the Sphinx engine as well as this Alpha mod (I'm on a dedicated server, using Debian and MySQL 5.0.45)
I know it is alpha code, but both MySQL fulltext and native method were killing us.

So far it works pretty well, but requires quite some manual things (change the tidying, add merge or re-index, etc...)
BTW, the search and indexing are now flying on the forum

Any chance we can have an updated version (I get mine from SVN about a week ago) ?

--Patrice

naderman · Post by **naderman** » Sat Nov 01, 2008 9:10 pm

I have finally updated this plugin to work with Sphinx 0.9.8. Sphinx 0.9.7 is no longer supported. A few bugs have been fixed and some parts (especially author search) should have become a lot faster. This version also has live updates on edit and post deletion.

I have released this as sphinx4phpbb 1.0.beta1. Please report back whether it works well for you!

If you have been using a previous version of the plugin from svn you can simply do an svn update. You should upgrade to Sphinx 0.9.8 first however. While you do that you should disable the Plugin (simply select fulltext native as the backend). You will also have to delete and recreate the Sphinx index for it to work properly afterwards.

yais · Post by **yais** » Mon Nov 03, 2008 10:31 pm

I have tried testing it locally, but PHP's exec function has been disabled. Does anyone know how to enable it. Can't find what to change in the php.ini file.

also, you got the url wrong in the first post. it is:

http://www.sphinxsearch.com/

oddfish · Post by **oddfish** » Tue Nov 04, 2008 8:54 pm

thanks naderman.

Can you please sort the search to correctly return an author's First post of topics only (advanced search).

currently, it returns all first posts (topics) that the author has entered a reply in.

that appears to be the only difference I can find at this stage between sphinx and native/mysql.

cheers,
oddfish.

naderman · Post by **naderman** » Wed Nov 05, 2008 7:19 pm

I'm not sure I understood you correctly. However there have been some issues with sorting that I fixed now, I will release Beta2 with some fixes from phpbb.com if all goes well now.

naderman · Post by **naderman** » Wed Nov 05, 2008 7:26 pm

yais wrote:I have tried testing it locally, but PHP's exec function has been disabled. Does anyone know how to enable it. Can't find what to change in the php.ini file.

Normally there should be a line saying something like

Code: Select all

disable_functions = [some comma seperated functions], exec, [more functions]

You need to remove exec from that list and it should work.

yais wrote:also, you got the url wrong in the first post. it is:

http://www.sphinxsearch.com/

Thanks, fixed that.

GoBieN · Post by **GoBieN** » Wed Nov 05, 2008 8:08 pm

What would be the advantage of this plugin over the normal search system ?

naderman · Post by **naderman** » Wed Nov 05, 2008 9:25 pm

It scales a lot better which allows really big sites to use it which have problems using the built-in search and it has a superior querying syntax with additional features: http://sphinxsearch.com/doc.html#searching . It also supports stemming which gives better results as well as a couple of other features documented on the Sphinx website.

geeheeb · Post by **geeheeb** » Wed Nov 05, 2008 9:26 pm

Hey, thanks for this! I'm trying it out now, and it the indexer is going crazy slowing down my 256MB VPS. Will this settle down once the board is indexed? For a 300mb database I wonder how long this would take.

What about the sphinx.conf file? Should I change indexer's mem_limit to be less than the 512 its currently set at? Any other optimizations?

geeheeb · Post by **geeheeb** » Wed Nov 05, 2008 9:26 pm

And once again, thank your for your work. This does look very promising!

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