1. Go to latest release download page, and download “Win32 binaries w/MySQL support” release. I am using Sphinx 2.0.3 version, on Vista. File name of downloaded file will be like sphinx-2.0.3-release-win32.zip.
2. Unzip the file. The unzipped content will look like c:/sphinx-2.0.3-win32/sphinx-2.0.3-win32/api etc.
3. Now copy/cut the c:/sphinx-2.0.3-win32/sphinx-2.0.3-win32/ inner folders and files
4. Create new folder in C:/sphinx/ (for the sake of simplicity i have selected this path, you can change it)
5. Paste the copied files and folders in this folder c:/sphinx/
6. Create c:/sphinx/data/ and c:/sphinx/log/ folders.
7. Create new text files c:/sphinx/log/query.log and c:/sphinx/log/searchd.log files. Note that files are having extension .log NOT the .log.txt or something.
8. We will be using simpler and easy to configure config file for sphinx. This file is c:/sphinx/sphinx-min.conf.in
9. Open c:/sphinx/sphinx-min.conf.in file in text editor and replace @CONFDIR@/ with c:/sphinx/ . There should be 5 lines where you need to replace this.
10. Now provide you mysql login info by updating sql_user, sql_pass and sql_db values. This will allow to test us the index creation and searching later. Also make appropriate changes to sample index “source src1″ which are changing query and attributes.
11. Open dos window by typing CMD in Run dialog and hitting enter.
12. In DOS window type C: and enter
13. Now type cd c:/sphinx/ . Now the command line should be looking like c:\sphinx>
14. Now type this command and hit enter C:\sphinx\bin\searchd –install –config C:\sphinx\sphinx-min.conf.in –servicename SphinxSearch
15. This will install the SphinxSearch as a service
16. Now I am assuming that you have made changes to config file correctly.
17. Now index the test index for the first time c:/sphinx/bin/indexer.exe –config C:\sphinx\sphinx-min.conf.in test1
18. Now to start the service use this command on Dos window C:\sphinx\bin\searchd.exe –ntservice –config C:\sphinx\sphinx-min.conf.in –servicename SphinxSearch
19. If every thing is OK then this command should show some results without errors. C:\sphinx\bin\search.exe –config C:\sphinx\sphinx.conf.in -i test1 term
20. The above command will tell if the “term” is found in “test1″ index.

Now we are done and you can start using sphinx via php or any other API. You may need to start service next time before using.

My local sphinx config file looks like this, you can use it by changing your mysql login info

#
# Minimal Sphinx configuration sample (clean, simple, functional)
#

source src1
{
	type			= mysql

	sql_host		= localhost
	sql_user		= root
	sql_pass		= password
	sql_db			= test
	sql_port		= 3306	# optional, default is 3306

	sql_query		= \
		SELECT id, name, state_id \
		FROM cities

	sql_attr_uint		= state_id
}

index test1
{
	source			= src1
	path			= c:/sphinx/data/test1
	docinfo			= extern
	charset_type		= sbcs
}

indexer
{
	mem_limit		= 32M
}

searchd
{
	listen			= 9312
	#listen			= 9306:mysql41
	log			= c:/sphinx/log/searchd.log
	query_log		= c:/sphinx/log/query.log
	read_timeout		= 5
	max_children		= 30
	pid_file		= c:/sphinx/log/searchd.pid
	max_matches		= 1000
	seamless_rotate		= 1
	preopen_indexes		= 1
	unlink_old		= 1
	workers			= threads # for RT to work
}

One reason behind this might be that this site is NOT powered by SPHINX, yes its true forums searching is not implemented on SPHINX.

Hope to have it back soon.

Today we will look how we will look on SPHINX’s ability to perform distributed searching. If you don’t know what sphinx is please refer to my other post Introduction to Sphinx Search.

For example if you have a large index you can easily distribute. You can create this index in chunks and assign each chunk to each sphinx agent. You will query to this index and sphinx will do the searching in parallel and give you final results. This dramatically improves the speed of searching. This concept similar to table partitioning in mysql.

Here is the example to setup a distributed index
index mycompleteindex
{
type = distributed
local = chunk0
agent = localhost:3312:chunk2
agent = localhost:3312:chunk3
agent = localhost:3312:chunk4
}

Here type = distributed tells that this is not a normal index. As we only have one searchd instance installed so we are using same instance localhost:3312 and declaring it an agent.

With each agent are have specified an chunk to be served by this agent. The example shows distributed searching in one system the same can be achieved by using separate server for each chunk.

Note that this post is only introduction to this feature for further details refer to sphinx documentation.

Happy Searching

• Use MyISAM Slaves: Keep all the tables with full-text on separate slave server and query that slave for full-text
• Use “Shadow” MyISAM Table: Update myisam table on each update of innodb table by triggers
• Leave Tables as MyISAM: leave the tables with full-text to myisam and update all other tables to Innodb.
• Use Sphinx or other external full text search engine

How do you implement full-text search for that 10+ million row table, keep up with the load, and stay relevant? Sphinx is good at those kinds of riddles.

Sphinx stands for SQL Phrase Index. It is free, open source, powerful, easy to use, full-text search engine, which comes with apis in PHP and other languages. Sphinx is being used by some very large sites like craigslist.org, netlog.com and more.

Its key features include

• high indexing speed (upto 10 MB/sec on modern CPUs)
• high search speed (avg query is under 0.1 sec on 2-4 GB text collections)
• high scalability (upto 100 GB of text, upto 100 M documents on a single CPU)
• supports distributed searching (since v.0.9.6)
• supports MySQL natively (MyISAM and InnoDB tables are both supported)
• supports phrase searching
• supports phrase proximity ranking, providing good relevance
• supports English and Russian stemming
• supports any number of document fields (weights can be changed on the fly)
• supports document groups
• supports stopwords
• supports different search modes (“match all”, “match phrase” and “match any” as of v.0.9.5)
• pure-PHP (ie. NO module compiling etc) search client API

Sphinx is one of the tool which I enjoyed to work with. I love its speed, stability and cool features. For more you can see following links

• Sphinx Home
• Documentation
• FAQ

Later we will be looking how to use sphinx things.