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My name is Kevin. I am a web professional living in Massachusetts. I build websites mostly using Drupal and jQuery. I use Vim even when I don't need to. When I'm not on the computer, I'm usually hanging with my wife, Melissa.

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apache

Apache Solr + Acquia Search = Rocks!

Submitted by Kevin Hankens on Fri, 02/27/2009 - 16:05

I finally got around to setting up the Apache Solr module and Acquia Search. Holy cow, it's crazy nice.

  • Faceted search - filter by author, content type, author, etc.
  • Speling suggestions!
  • Crazy relevant
  • Crazy fast

So, the Acquians have been hard at work setting up a big cluster of Solr servers in the cloud to get ready for the big launch of Acquia Search. It's cool because they do all of the heavy lifting and Solr maintenance for you. Drupal search is meh, ok but Solr search is insanely fast and relevant. Your site sends an index (securely) to the Acquia servers, then all of your site queries go (securely) to the Acquia servers to retrieve results.

It's even complete with Drupal access API integration. If you are running the Node Access module, or Organic Groups, it will respect your node permissions!

Drupal.org just switched over to it and people are finally using the site search instead of Google - that's saying something! :)

More regression testing

Submitted by Kevin Hankens on Thu, 02/19/2009 - 16:55

Very interesting test results from some regression testing I did today for a client. I was using Siege and Apache AB for anonymous user testing, and attempting to simulate authenticated users by specifying cookie data with AB. The tests were done remotely from an EC2 instance.

Here were the basic commands:

> ab -t 300 -kc 50 http://example.com/
> ab -t 300 -kc 50 -CSESS[...]=[...] http://example.com/
> siege -c 50 -t 300s -f url_list.txt

Rough Results:

No Drupal caching; No opcode caching
AB Anonymous 5.23 req./sec.
AB Authenticated 3.20 req./sec.
Siege Anonymous 7.0 req./sec.
Normal Drupal caching; No opcode caching
AB Anonymous 121.34 req./sec.
AB Authenticated 6.40 req./sec.
Siege Anonymous 218.83 req./sec.
Normal Drupal caching; eaccelerator enabled
AB Anonymous 338.31 req./sec.
AB Authenticated 14.49 req./sec.
Siege Anonymous 543.50 req./sec.

I ran each test a few times and selected the median value. So, these aren't 100% conclusive, but there is definitely a trend here. The interesting thing is the huge difference between anonymous and authenticated users.