Not using ElasticSearch? Why not?

[Tracy]

I've put off (for years) investing in ElasticSearch and it's add-on for XenForo... but with my most recent niche of interest... I can no longer justify it.
The default mySQL search sucks for many of the terms used in the niche... and we won't mention Chef's favorite salty product.
You can reduce mySQL to 2 or 3 letter search terms.. but it still fails miserably in actually giving "decent" returns on said searches.
With the ES add-on (for XF - think Woltlab is a paid 1st party add-on for it now and not sure about IPS as it was supposed to "replace" Sphinx), a search on my site of a simple term of M82) returns WAY more than it ever did using the simple mySQL function.

If you run a niche site where 2-3 letter acronyms are common... then I actively encourage you to invest the time (and possibly money) into enabling ElasticSearch for your site.

This DOES require that you either be on a VPS/dedicated server with adequate resources, or you to engage a 3rd party provider of ElasticSearch services.
It's not that hard to set up on your VPS.. but it does take some care as you don't want to leave the ES port open to the public.

 

[Arantor]

I think there's several factors - I think that most people don't need or want to go to a VPS, I think most people don't want to scratch around (or manage) a VPS that's big enough to sensibly have ES on it, and for many people setting it up is beyond their limits.

'Not that hard' is highly relative.

There's also the fact that for many people, search is just not that relevant on their site, or at least perceived not to be all that relevant.

I also wish Sphinx had been more of a driving force, because there are things it did better than ES but as a developer, ES is much easier to do things with.

 

[Tracy]

I think there's several factors - I think that most people don't need or want to go to a VPS

For ES, it's not required... there are 3rd party providers for it.
There is also at least one quality shared hosting provider I know of that offers it on their platform.
If you are on the XF SaaS, then you also have ES available to you if I remember correctly.

If one is already running a VPS, then in the grand scheme of things, no, installing ES is not that hard. It's a LOT simpler than setting up the MTA or even creating your own CRON scripts.
ES also (for XenForo) gives you more features than search functions.... generally that Similar Threads you see at the bottom of an XF site is a feature of having ES installed (along with the XF ES add-on).
As for "leaving ports open".... again, everyday part of actually administering a VPS. If one doesn't have the level of knowledge to do such, then one really has no "reason" to at the shell (which is what I consider administering a VPS/dedi, not doing it from a panel).

I never really understood why IPS stripped Sphinx out of their script since it appeared to work well .... and then finally implemented ES, other than "It's what all the other scripts use".

 

[kensonplays]

I don't use it simply because I can't afford it right now.

 

[Tracy]

I don't use it simply because I can't afford it right now.

Yeah, unluckily most of the paid scripts it's an additional fee 1st party add-on to use it.... but as I said, for me (for my current site) it brought benefits that will be useful if the site takes off.

 

[kensonplays]

Yeah, unluckily most of the paid scripts it's an additional fee 1st party add-on to use it.... but as I said, for me (for my current site) it brought benefits that will be useful if the site takes off.

Yea, I'm holding off on renewing my license until 2.3 comes out, unless a 2.2.14 or .15 comes out with some bug fixes that actually affect me. I'm currently on .12, and am having zero issues at the moment. No reason to renew at the moment tbh.

 

[Tracy]

Yea, I'm holding off on renewing my license until 2.3 comes out

I renewed recently ( as a second year since last renewal)... before that, I had gone 2 years between renewals. The ONLY reason I renewed after 2 years is I wanted to run the latest of @Bob's add-ons... it wasn't anything that XF brought to the table. His add-ons bring so much to the XF table it's ridiculous.

 

[kensonplays]

I renewed recently ( as a second year since last renewal)... before that, I had gone 2 years between renewals. The ONLY reason I renewed after 2 years is I wanted to run the latest of @Bob's add-ons... it wasn't anything that XF brought to the table. His add-ons bring so much to the XF table it's ridiculous.

Yea, cept I'm currently unemployed so a $140 renewal (including ES addition) plus a renewal for a few other addons and stuff could easily reach over 200 for me.

 

[Arantor]

If one is already running a VPS, then in the grand scheme of things, no, installing ES is not that hard

I watched a *team* of professional software developers fail to install it on their (Ubuntu) Linux laptops. (Reason: memory use vs systemd and needing to manually configure the amount of memory it was allowed to consume, except not in the usual places. Even the sysadmin team was surprised) Even when we got it Dockerised for our setup, it still was flaky if you didn't have it tuned just right. But tell me again how easy it is to install, especially for people who don't care to invest hours and hours in their system setup.

It's "not required" to be on a VPS but it needs enough memory that almost no shared provider offers it.

I never really understood why IPS stripped Sphinx out of their script since it appeared to work well

Because Sphinx actually requires some thought to use and ES is more 'throw things at the wall and see what sticks'. You have a lot more immediate flexibility in what you shove into ES than you do Sphinx but you pay for it in terms of memory, disk and CPU resources (by quite a margin last I benchmarked it, which would have been 2016)

It's been a long time since I actually contributed to Sphinx, back when I was an editor for the manual, version numbers were still below 1.0 (I was using it in production at 0.98). The BM25 ranker still, for my money, performs better than the Lucene ranking algorithm baked into ES for matches of phrases (and matches on non phrases works about as well either way because you're still governed by the document frequency/term frequency calculation metric, though you have choices around individual weightings for fields beyond that)

I remember my first VPS - would have been maybe upgraded to 320MB of RAM by then - handled Sphinx just fine but ES wanted more RAM even back then.

 

[Bob]

Yea, cept I'm currently unemployed so a $140 renewal (including ES addition) plus a renewal for a few other addons and stuff could easily reach over 200 for me.

I just renewed your UBS Premium license for another year. One less renewal to worry about

 

[kensonplays]

I just renewed your UBS Premium license for another year. One less renewal to worry about

Aw, you didn't have too. Thanks! What's the most recent version that works with 2.2.12? I'm on 2.2.27.

 

[Bob]

Aw, you didn't have too. Thanks! What's the most recent version that works with 2.2.12? I'm on 2.2.27.

Two newer releases since 2.2.27.

• UBS 2.2.28 (May 19th) (9 new features, 4 updated features, 2 minor bug fixes)
• UBS 2.2.29 (June 10th) (1 new feature, 2 updated features and 3 minor bug fixes).

 

[Cedric]

Aw, you didn't have too. Thanks! What's the most recent version that works with 2.2.12? I'm on 2.2.27.

No, he doesn’t but that’s Bob. Greatest developer on XF. 😃

 

[kensonplays]

Two newer releases since 2.2.27.

• UBS 2.2.28 (May 19th) (9 new features, 4 updated features, 2 minor bug fixes)
• UBS 2.2.29 (June 10th) (1 new feature, 2 updated features and 3 minor bug fixes).

Sweet, wanted confirmation since I've had issues with themes updated for 2.2.13, so wanted to make sure that everything I use is compatible with 2.2.12. Keep up the great work!

 

[Bob]

Sweet, wanted confirmation since I've had issues with themes updated for 2.2.13, so wanted to make sure that everything I use is compatible with 2.2.12. Keep up the great work!

Ya, min requirement is XF 2.2.2, so you are good to go

 

[Ravenfreak]

The price for ElasticSearch addon is just out of my price range. I don't have much money to spend on my hobby as much as I would love to, which is also why I'm still on shared hosting and not VPS. I can see ElasticSearch being a good tool to have on a much larger board than my own though too.