Thinking sphinx automatic indexing?

Thinking Sphinx needs to know which models have indexes for searching and indexing – and so it would load every single model when the environment is initialised, just to figure this out. While this was necessary, it also is slow for applications with more than a handful of models… and in development mode, this hit happens on every single page load. Now, though, Thinking Sphinx only runs this load request when you’re searching or indexing.

While this doesn’t make a difference in production environments, it should make life on your workstations a little happier. In a similar vein, anything within the define_index block is now evaluated when it’s needed. This means you can have it anywhere in your model files, whereas before, it had to appear after association definitions, else Thinking Sphinx would complain that they didn’t exist.

This feature actually introduced a fair few bugs, but (thanks to some patience from early adopters), it now runs smoothly. And if it doesn’t, you know where to find me. Over the course of the month, Thinking Sphinx and Riddle went through some changes as to how they’d be required (depending on your version of Sphinx).

First, there was separate gems for 0.9.8 and 0.9.9, and then single gems with different require statements. Neither of these approaches were ideal, which Ben Schwarz clarified for me. So I spent a day or two working on a solution, and now Thinking Sphinx will automatically detect which version you have installed.

You don’t need any version numbers in your require statements. The one catch with this is that you currently need Sphinx installed on every machine that needs to know about it, including web servers that talk to Sphinx on a separate server. There’s an issue logged for this, and I’ll be figuring out a solution soon.

This isn’t quite a Thinking Sphinx feature, but it’s worth noting that Sphinx 0.9.9 final release is now available. If you’re upgrading (which should be painless), the one thing to note is that the default port for Sphinx has changed from 3312 to 9312. If you want to grab the latest and greatest Thinking Sphinx, then version 1.3.14 is what to install.

And read the documentation on upgrading!