Django haystack and whoosh

Question

Does anyone have any experience using django-haystack with the whoosh backend?

I'm looking to use it for a categorized live-search type tool. Is it gonna be fast/efficient enough in a production environment to avoid setting up either solr or xapian?

Answer 1

I found xapian extremely easy to setup on my Debian.

aptitude install python-xapian

and that's all.

To use it with django there is a very good app named djapian.

Answer 2

As a general principle, I put Whoosh in the same category as SQLite: great for getting started, wonderful for single-user or really small-scale apps, but not suitable for large-scale deployment.

Whoosh is, in my experience, about an order of magnitude slower than Solr. A typical search against a bigish Solr index I've got in production takes about a hundredth of a second ; the same search using Whoosh and the same data takes roughly a tenth of second.

You should decide what's "fast enough" for you, but I don't think Whoosh is a good idea for anything where you expect high performance.

Answer 3

I would go with either Solr or Xapian (although it's not quite officially supported by haystack yet; see this thread). Solr is easy to setup and get running if you follow the tutorial, however I've had a heck of a time getting it installed in a production environment - but that's mostly due to my lack of experience with Java server environments. Your mileage may vary.

I'd also put in another plug for djapian. It's very well documented and is under very active development.