[Xapian-discuss] Moving to 1.0.x

[Mike Boone]

Hi all,

I have had a site happily running Xapian 0.8.x through the PHP/SWIG
bindings for a few years. I am moving the site to new hardware and
figured it would be a good time to upgrade Xapian to 1.0.x. There seem
to be plenty of changes. I believe I have correctly updated my PHP
code to the more OO-like syntax. But I have some questions:

* My Xapian job that updated the database always looked for db_lock to
determine if another write job was using the database. That file seems
to be gone now, and "flintlock", a possible replacement, is always
present, writing or not. What's the proper check now?

* Indexing consumes a lot of memory, which constantly grows as I add
documents. I do two indexes, one of 215,000 small documents and
another of 130,000 larger documents. Indexing the entire set of one or
the other results in a process that eats hundreds of megabytes.
Perhaps these are all being cached and flushed at the very end? What
is the default flush threshold and how can I adjust it via PHP? Is
there anything else I can do to keep usage reasonable? The box has
2GB.

* This question might be hard to answer without seeing code, but so
far in testing, the searches on 1.0.3 are running somewhat slower than
the old 0.8.x searches. And the 1.0.3 searches are running on faster
hardware with no user load yet. Are there any gotchas that I might
have overlooked when converting my PHP code from the 0.8.x to the
current version? I basically converted each Xapian-related statement
from the 0.8.x syntax to a 1.0.3 equivalent. Perhaps there are
features I overlooked in doing that.

Thanks for the input.
Mike.