Question on scalability

Ruby Apps Ferret
1

Hi all,

I’ve had a lot of fun over the last couple of days integrating Ferret
with
my Rails app. Many thanks to Dave Balmain for writing this.
Everything
seems to work well and my site now has full search capabilities. But
I’m
wondering how I can scale my site now?

What would be the recommended approach in terms of sharing indexes
across
multiple servers? Is the solution to use a shared filesystem? Is
it ok
for multiple applications to update the indexes concurrently?

Thanks,

Joe

2

Joseph Chan wrote:

What would be the recommended approach in terms of sharing indexes
across
multiple servers?

I’d try using a DRb server for the index. It’s very easy to implement
and should avoid locking problems.

Is the solution to use a shared filesystem? Is
it ok
for multiple applications to update the indexes concurrently?

In my experience, no. I often had problems with stale lockfiles and
other weird behaviour, and I found it much more reliable to use only one
writing process.