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Macrotone blogs upon Joomla, our products and other matters.

Joomla Smart Search Index size observations.

We have recently upgraded the underlying database version of our Joomla site to MySQL 5.5, from 5.1 and carefully observed the sizes of the underlying databases as we progressed. The source database was reported as being some 200Mb in size, which is not excessive for our modest site, but we were very surprised when after restoring the system to the new database the database size was reported as 37Mb.  We understand how databases store their data, so it was not the fact that it was smaller than was the surprise more the dramatic difference.

We then proceeded to rebuild the ‘Smart Search (Finder)’ indexes and checked the database size yet again.  This is necessary, since the backup does not by default include the Smart Search table data in the dump file. It was now reported as being 147Mb, and increase of 110Mb.

The fact that this increase was on our modest site, must make one wonder whether the benefits out weight the database storage overhead.  Ours’ is certainly not a large site, and the use of ‘smart search’ on large sites is not something we would wish to consider, and a dedicated standalone search engine, such as Solr, or possibly the Google Site Search, rather than the pure-PHP implementation used in Smart Search may well be found to be more suitable.

Smart Search itself consists of a number of ‘tables’ in the Joomla installation, of which at least 16  are "mapping tables". These mapping tables resolve the many-to-many relationship between search terms and the content items that contain them. In theory those 16 tables could be merged into a single table and doing so would have negligible impact on small sites. However, on larger sites there would be a substantial impact on performance because the mapping table would have a very large number of entries and updating such a large table can be time-consuming.  Maintaining the search term index requires a fair amount of disk space, which increases the more terms that content items contain. Since phrases are also indexed, the longer the phrases, the more disk space required. For Smart Search a reasonable compromise has to be reached between search usability and disk space usage.

Our observations must question this compromise and possibly we need to review the settings that we are actually using. It is likely that most readers may not be aware of exactly how large the ‘smart search tables’’ are in their own Joomla installations.  The decision as to whether to continue using the Smart Search’ component should also be reviewed.

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