Sphinx search or MySQL for a huge database search enginee

Question

So I'm working on a huge eCommerce solution on top of Symfony2, Doctrine2 and MySQL (maybe a cluster since we will have a lot of people connected and working in our platform) so I'm trying to decide if will be better to use Sphinx search or MysQL for search solution since some data will need to be duplicated in MySQL tables and in Sphinx. Our main goal is performance so excellent response times is what we look for. I'm not an expert in none so I need some advice from people here based on theirs experience and so on, maybe some docs or whatever. What path did yours take on this side.

PS: The DB will grow up really fast take that into account and the platform will be for the entire worl

Answer 1

Sphinx is usually preferred when it comes to performance vs MySQL for high volume searches because it's easy to scale. You will have a delay on results, to allow it to sync data with mysql, but even so it's better.

You should also take a good look at the actual queries that will run and store in Sphinx only the fields that are searchable along with their ids. Once you get the ids from sphinx, to list them use a mysql slave to get their other, non-searchable data.

Depending on what queries you are using for search,

A better solution than sphinx is Amazon Cloudsearch . We had a hard time implementing it, but it was well worth it, both time and $$$, and it replaced our sphinx solution