For a while now I’ve been working on a really long and detailed post comparing the different search systems available for rails projects. I just deleted the draft.

I deleted it because I realized there really isn’t anything to compare. If you don’t need live updated search results and you can live with an index that’s updated every 15 minutes or more, just use Sphinx. Sphinx with Thinking Sphinx by Pat Allan is simply the most elegant, full featured and most importantly, stable search system available for rails today. We’ve been using it over at gawkk for months now and haven’t had a single unhappy moment since we switched from Solr.

SQL searches are slow. Ferret is crap in production. Solr is almost as unstable as Ferret in production and will bring down your database with unnecessary connections every time a damn object is instantiated. Sphinx is rock solid and fast as hell.

I will only offer two lines of proof:

Over a million documents in 117 seconds. Try and do that with anything other than Sphinx. I dare you.