Elasticsearch over mysql search performance

Question

I'm making a website using Symfony 2 and Mysql as DBMS. Now, the site involves some entities that can be searchable from the home page and the searches can be by term and by location, not the two at the same time. The thing is that I installed elasticsearch on my server to index the searchable entities.

Now, does anyone knows the performance advantages of searching between a mysql search and and elasticsearch search?

Consider that on the mysql database all searchable fields are indexed using a FULL TEXT index and on the elasticsearch index all fields are indexed to be able to search on them.

Answer 1

In my tests, elasticsearch queries have up to 6x faster than sql queries with mysql and Doctrine. But for security part, I have always been keeping all the information backed up in mysql. As far as I've read this is a common practice. After almost a year making queries in elasticsearch I feel more comfortable to make complex queries and I find better results with free text inputs.