[msvan]

How does Meilisearch compare to ElasticSearch from an operational point of view? I've experienced ElasticSearch to be quite painful to maintain, requiring lots of manual tweaking to balance shards and careful design of indices.

[paraboul]

I've been using Meilisearch in production for quite some time now, and TBH it has been one of the easiest service to maintain (I mean, it's just a single statically linked binary) and with close to zero configuration.

[AlexAltea]

Is it really "just a single statically linked binary"?

I'd love to use Meilisearch as you describe, but their so-called SDKs are just for clients, so you still need the Meilisearch server listening on localhost.

I would love to see something like SQLite based on Meilisearch (i.e. a fully self-contained search library like https://github.com/mchaput/whoosh). Do you know if such a thing exists?

[paraboul]

I was referring to the server daemon, not the client libraries.

But ofc, it's a process not an embeddable library, so you can't just link it against your app like you would with SQLite or rocksdb.

Although it looks like it's build around their core library "milli" though (https://github.com/meilisearch/milli/), so probably something doable in the future?

[AlexAltea]

Thank you very much, that's precisely what I was looking for!

[tpayet]

That's the point! We don't ambition to compete with Elastic on everything (logs, analytics, etc). We are doing search for front-end users with a strong focus on relevancy, speed & developer experience. You can read a bit more on our documentation https://docs.meilisearch.com/learn/what_is_meilisearch/compa...

[sidmitra]

A quick question, are there any limits around number of separate indexes we can have with meilisearch? I'm thinking atleast say 20-30K separate indexes to start with.

My use case is that i want to start creating some indexes that are "per-user" and some "per-company" where a company(customer) might have many users. This is to do some sort of double tenant isolation. I will create different keys that have permission to specific indexes and deliver those to the user somehow. My current solution does hacky things with Elasticsearch like adding query filters by user/company-id attributes in the background automatically. But since meilisearch would be customer facing, i need stronger guarantees around permissions per index.

I tried this out a year ago on Meilsearch locally, but haven't stress tested it by creating thousands of them like production.

Or is there a better way to do this. This is also a reason where memory-only systems like Typesense didn't make sense to me. I'm fine with taking a performance hit by going to disk to pull the right index. Not every index will be used all the time. I might also look at sharding/partitioning features if present.

[dureuill]

Hello!

> A quick question, are there any limits around number of separate indexes we can have with meilisearch?

Yes! In v1.0, about 180 indexes under Linux in the same instance[1]. The good news is that I'm personally working on lifting this limitation for v1.1 (planned to release in the beginning of April), which should be able to accommodate an unlimited number of indexes[2] (disk space permits, of course).

Note that having many indexes does have an impact on performance and will keep doing so even after v1.1.

> Or is there a better way to do this.

If it works for your use case, you can try using a single index (or a few indexes) with tenant tokens[3] for multitenancy.

Hope this helps :-)

[1]: https://docs.meilisearch.com/learn/advanced/known_limitation...

[2]: https://github.com/meilisearch/meilisearch/issues/3382

[3]: https://docs.meilisearch.com/learn/security/tenant_tokens.ht...