This Documentation Applies to CATS Version 0.6.1 |
---|
The CATS Team has since released new versions, the material documented here likely will not work on the new versions without modification. |
The base CATS package uses MySQL's fulltext search capability for the Candidate Resume Keyword search. The author found the speed of this search unacceptable, taking 30 - 40+ seconds to return search results on a database of ~4,000 candidates. Testing with Sphinx on that same database produced search result times under one second.
Sphinx was chosen as an alternative to the MySQL fulltext search due to its speed, PHP API, and the ease with which it could be integrated into the base CATS system.
Sphinx is an open-source search engine available from sphinxsearch.com. The version installed by the author was Sphinx 0.9.7-RC2 installed from source on a SUSE Linux system. Sphinx is also available for other platforms, including Windows. Note that the current version of Sphinx's searchd has a serious limitation of one connection when run under Windows, so a Windows-based installation of Sphinx is not recommended for production environments.
The following documents the installation process and configuration changes made to integrate Sphinx into CATS.
IMPORTANT NOTE - The installation instructions and scripts assume that the CATS system is installed in the /srv/www/htdocs/cats directory, if your installation is to a different directory, you must make appropriate changes to all references to that directory.