Is there a C# open-source search app which scales cheaply?

Question

I need to quickly replace a listings website which has the following characteristics:

• smallish database (10,000 items, < 1GB)
• < 10% of the items updated/created/removed daily
• most common activity is searching the whole dataset, returning 1-1000 items
• traffic peaks at 1m page impressions per day

Scaling strategy for the existing app has been to separate read-only and read/write activity. Multiple slave databases are used for searching and writes are done to a master, which update the slaves using MS SQL replication.

Since read activity is more common than write, this has proved to be a cheap way to do database load balancing, without true clustering.

I now need to replace the app - are there any C# open-source apps which scale as neatly as this?

Answer 1

You could try SQL Express it is free and has a free manager similar to SQL Server Management Studio.

Answer 2

As I see it searching for data and storing data are two different business operations. Personally I am a big fan of Lucene.NET for searching and would recommending investigating if it fits your needs. Lucene.NET has a number of pitfalls and writing to the index can be rather slow. In your situation I think you should stick with storing your data in a relational database (I.E., SQL Server) and look at modifying the searching component of your application.