Ferret’s what we use as our search engine. It’s the Ruby port of Lucene. We really like it & would recommend it to others.

But a while ago we ran into a problem with Ferret. The index Ferret created would sometimes be corrupted upon system activation. It may have been the version, it may have been the manner of system generation.

We fixed the problem by removing the pre-built index. Instead, the fist search conducted on a new system would trigger a “rebuild” for all content in the system.

This seemed like a good solution at the time, as it guaranteed a reliable demo experience. There was just 1 tiny problem - the “rebuild” took time. And that meant the first user experience with search was by far the slowest.

Well, time passed and we added more content. Which in turn meant the rebuild took longer. Depending on overall system utilization it can take anywhere from 25s to 45s. And that’s a long time for your 1st search!

So, due to popular request, the pre-built Ferret index is back & appears to be copying reliable. 1st search performance has gone from 30s to around 1s.

And to be frank, we should have made this change a lot sooner.. Enjoy the speedier demo experience!

-Dave

p.s. It’s likely the same strategy will be applied to our next Open Source Edition distro.