News

Search speed improvements

Published on March 19, 2021

Hello everyone,

in recent months the response times of the search had become pretty slow, usually taking several seconds to return results.

I therefore spent some time to switch the underlying full text search to utilize MeiliSearch instead of Postgres' built-in full text search as the index after some initial prototyping had shown promising results (Related PRs: 1 and 2).

I did some simple benchmarks after the switch and the response times went down from ~13 seconds to ~1 second. Still not great, but it's back to reasonable usability again. I will keep looking into potential further improvements of this in the next months.

In other news in the beginning of this year I have upgraded the site to run on Ruby 3 and the latest version of Rails and I'd like to take this opportunity to extend a big thank you to all contributors that continue to make the Ruby ecosystem such a pleasant place.

Stay safe and healthy and until next time!

Best,
Christoph