How to cache Zend Lucene search results in Code Igniter?

Question

I'm not sure if this is the best way to go about this, but my aim is to have pagination of my lucene search results.

I thought it would make sense to run the search, store all the results in the cache, and then have a page function on my results controller that could return any particular subset of results from the cached results.

Is this a bad approach? I've never used caching of any sort, so don't know where to begin. The CI Caching Driver looked promising, but everything throws a server error. I don't know if I need to install APC, or Memcached, or what to do.

Help!

Why are you caching the results? As in, is there an actual need to, or are you just doing it because you think Lucene will be too slow? — ZoFreX, Jun 17 '11 at 12:35

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 06 '11 at 18:53

Lucene is a search engine that is built for scale. You can push it pretty far till the need arises to cache the search results. I would suggest you use the default settings and run it.

If you still feel the need for cache, first look at this Lucene FAQ and then the next level would perhaps be something on the lines of memcache.

Hope it helps!

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 28 '11 at 11:36

Zend Search Lucene is indexed on the file system and as the user above has stated, built for scale. Unless you are indexing hundreds of thousands of documents, then caching is not really necessary - especially since all you would effectively be doing is taking data from one file and storing it in another.

On the other hand, if you are only storing, say, product Id in your search index and then selecting the products from the database when you get a result, it's well worth caching. This can easily be achived by using Zend_Cache.

A basic example of Zend Db caching is here:

$frontendOptions = array(
    'automatic_serialization' => true
);

$backendOptions = array(
    'cache_dir' => YOUR_CACHE_PATH_ON_THE_FILE_SYSTEM,
    'file_name_prefix' => 'my_cache_prefix',
);

$cache = Zend_Cache::factory('Core',
    'File',
    $frontendOptions,
    $backendOptions
);
Zend_Db_Table_Abstract::setDefaultMetadataCache($cache);

This should be added to your bootstrap file in an _initDbCache (call it whatever you want) method.

Of course that is a very simple implementation and does not achieve full result caching, more information on Zend Caching with Zend Db can be found here.

How to cache Zend Lucene search results in Code Igniter?

2 Answers2