Comment by nchmy

6 hours ago

what do you think about ManticoreSearch? It has been around longer than Lucene

I have no experience with ManticoreSearch but they've been around for a while. I think it migh be a Sphinx spinoff, this was a long abandoned solr like search engine written in C++ that they seem to have forked (correct me if I'm wrong). Mainly popular for some ecommerce use cases (as is the case with Solr). Looking at their front page I don't see any compelling reason to switch and a couple of things that I don't like

- GPLv3 better than AGPLv3 in Elasticsearch but less permissive than Apache 2.0 in Opensearch.

- They seem to emphasize being a drop in replacement a lot. Which raises the question: why not just stick with Opensearch.

- I'm very skeptical of benchmarks in this space. Mostly they are apples and oranges comparisons. As I argued earlier it mainly raises the question what they are not doing or skipping. Barring major algorithmic improvements which Lucene developers could just copy if it's valid, I don't see how they could be better/faster. And Lucene is of course well known to be heavily optimized and still squeezing out a lot of performance from release to release. Progress has been pretty substantial in v8 and v9 in recent years.

Other than that they seem to know what they are doing is the best I can say about it.

  • Yeah, it forked from sphinx when sphinx died or rugpulled or something like that. Seems to be very actively maintained.

    I think one of the main draws is that it is a single binary rather than the complexity of ES/OS, JVM etc... And if you have a mysql/mariadb database, it just connects and automatically ingests extremely quickly. They also use Galera for replication, but I also think its not as explicitly shareded, which simplifies things.

    Yeah, their benchmarks are astounding, so much so that it is hard to believe. yet, I have seen them be quite open to feedback, collaboration etc so

    Anyway, thanks for your thoughts and insights!