Manticore? Should I jump ship from Sphinx?

[Walter Lee Davis]

I have a very old application, started in Rails 3, upgraded to 4, and now being rebuilt in 6. I have read some of the docs for Manticore, and I think heard it mentioned in this list not too long ago, too. Given that I have never really exhausted what Sphinx can do, I've never considered changing for change's sake. Can anyone give me the pro's and con's of the two? Should I invest time in learning a new engine? Is there that much different to absorb? I suspect that TS renders a lot of these differences quite moot, since it straddles over the two and gives me a higher-level interface to configure and consume either engine.

Thoughts?

Thanks in advance,

Walter

[Pat Allan]

Hi Walter,

From Thinking Sphinx’s perspective externally and internally, they are the same. The binaries have the same names, which is because Manticore is a fork of Sphinx. Manticore has been under active development for some time, so there’s a bunch of new features there, but Thinking Sphinx doesn’t take advantage of those, so there’s not much in the way of new benefits.

But the advantages for Manticore I see are as follows:

• It works with MySQL v8
• It’s under active development
• It remains open source

Sphinx v3.1.1 does work with MySQL v8, but I’ve found that this release of Sphinx doesn’t like empty indices, and so it’s not viable for anyone using SQL-backed delta indices with Thinking Sphinx. Sphinx is currently not open-sourced - which I suspect was prompted by the appearance of Manticore, because it had been open before that - but it also doesn’t seem to be under active development. 3.1.1 was released 18 months ago, and there’s been nothing new since.

That’s not to say Sphinx no longer works - I’ve found v2.2.11 continues to work well, but given it must be compiled against what is an old version of MySQL (5.7 or older), that makes it a far less compelling option moving forward.

So it’s perhaps worth giving Manticore a shot, at least from the perspective of future-proofing your app. You’re not going to need to change anything in your use of Thinking Sphinx, though you will need to re-index from scratch - it’s recommended that you delete all Sphinx index and binlog files. There’s no new features available to Thinking Sphinx users though - I’m not against adding new things in, mind you, but there’s been no requests thus far.

Cheers,

— 

Pat

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