[traverseda]

I'd say that the bit where typesense can only work with data that fits in ram is actually a pretty big problem for a lot of use cases, as an aside. That feature alone would discount typesense for basically all of my personal projects. Might be a trade off I'd be willing to make on a professional project given the other features but it seems really wasteful.

Personally I find the meilisearch comparison to be more useful for the type of stuff I'm doing: https://docs.meilisearch.com/learn/what_is_meilisearch/compa...

Of course I'm not a large enterprise e-commerce site. I'm doing personal projects like web archiving, (dataset probably won't be anywhere near fitting in ram) or I'm using search engines on embedded devices (search needs to play well with others, not use all my ram).

[remram]

That is also MeiliSearch's recommended setup though:

> For the best performance, it is recommended to provide the same amount of RAM as the size the database takes on disk

https://docs.meilisearch.com/learn/advanced/storage.html#lmd...

[traverseda]

There's a big difference between recommended and required. Of course things work better if your entire dataset fits in ram, and of course at the giant enterprise scale you can do that, but it's not something I'm going to do on my VPS along side wordpress, you know? I don't really care about getting maximum possible performance when the data is only going to be accessed intermittently. I care about letting the OS maximize performance by choosing what gets cached in ram.

[jabo]

Typesense follows a memory model similar to Redis - you need sufficient RAM to hold the entire dataset.

I don't want to speak for the Meilisearch team, but from observing user reports like this [1], it seems to me like you'd need at least X-2X RAM to run Meilisearch, if X is the size of your dataset, if you want it to not slow down as it swaps content from Disk to RAM.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34708658

[traverseda]

I mean that user report is from me, and was about a very very early meilisearch version. Maybe wrong link?

> if you want it to not slow down as it swaps content from Disk to RAM.

Obviously it's going to be fastest to run with your entire dataset in RAM, that's never in doubt. Part of why I find the whole typesense comparison page disingenuous is that you're making the ability to swap to disk sound like an anti-feature. The whole things just sounds biased in a way that the meilisearch comparison doesn't.

There are some killer features in typesense for sure, just my first impression of it is that it's very much aimed at someone other than me.

>Typesense follows a memory model similar to Redis

The difference is that redis is primarily being used as a cache, or for IPC, or as a task-queue. You're not loading a whole bunch of data into, and you expect that the data you have in it will either be short-lived (IPC, queue) or can be evicted with no issues (caching).

[jabo]

> Part of why I find the whole typesense comparison page disingenuous is that you're making the ability to swap to disk sound like an anti-feature.

Didn’t intend it that way. In fact, we recommend that users configure swap space even in Typesense as a safety mechanism.

May I know which part of the comparison table makes it sound like that?

The one under Index location says: “Disk with Memory Mapped files” for Meilisearch, which I updated based on the Meilisearch team’s feedback…

Edit: To your first point, I meant to link to the parent comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34708352

I’ve also seen similar RAM recommendations from the Meilisearch team on GitHub to other users reporting similar performance issues.

[traverseda]

>May I know which part of the comparison table makes it sound like that?

Well a few things. Normally I'd try to coach these a bit kinder and all that, but I hope you don't mind if I just come out and talk about the issues. Keep in mind that these are just my interpretations after a quick read through.

# Bias

> Instant Search-as-you-type Experiences for up to a few hundred thousand records, that don't require a production-grade highly-available setup.

Seeing as meilisearch is your biggest competitor saying that they're not "production grade" sounds biased. "Production grade" is subjective, and I understand why it's written that way you define production grade to include high-availability multi-node configurations. I don't necessarily disagree but I think you need to drop "production grade" from that sentence and just say "high availability". Maybe add a row to your overview talking about high availability since it seems to be one of the factors you consider to be a significant differentiator.

>Only supports a single-node setup, which creates a potential single point of failure and so is not production-ready, despite the v1.x versioning.

This here is another spot where you seem biased. Remove the "despite v1.x versioning", it comes off as petty. I'd also remove the part where you say "is not production ready". You seem to have a very concrete idea of what production looks like, but for me one example of production looks like a raspberry pi in a school house in rural africa (internet in a box project). Under those constraints typesense isn't production ready.

I get what you're saying about "production ready" but there must be another way to word it?

The whole "production ready" line of reasoning comes off as arrogant and petty in general.

>Runtime Dependencies [...] Recommends use of nginx, apache or the like as a reverse proxy in front

Meilisearch is also a single self-contained binary with an embedded http server. I don't think either of you support https. Do you really not recommend the use of a reverse proxy? How do you route subdomains? I guess you're assuming it's running on a stand alone computer with a public facing IP and no SSL? Are you not providing a frontend/dashboard? You've made this sound like a draw back, if you had of put "None. Self-contained binary" in front of it like you did for yourself that would be fine but for this you mention a feature that you have while ignoring what looks to me like the same feature in your competitor.

>Language support

This is also a bit confusing, and I can't help but think it's probably not completely honest. What makes meilisearch different so that it doesn't support "all languages", but elasticsearch does? Meilisearch certainly claims to support all languages where words are seperated by spaces, do you support languages that don't have words separated by spaces?

This implication for this line seems to be that meilisearch isn't indexing on unicode, or something. Just weird, needs more detail probably.

This user claims that meilisearch has better multi-language support: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34708802

So what's the difference?

>Number of Documents

This is completely fine! Good job linking to the pertinent issue and everything. This is how you mention significant drawbacks without seeming biased or petty.

# Target use case

This also seems to be pretty firmly aimed at large enterprise clients. If that's not the impression you're going for, well change the memory model but there's some language in this comparison that can probably help.

> CDN-like Geo-Distributed clusters

Just sounds buzz-wordy to me. Might be fine if I didn't get the impression for the previous paragraphs that my use cases weren't "production ready (webscale?)" and that I'm using it wrong if it's not on a server with 24 TB of ram.

This is more about who the intended customer is than about bias though, so I don't think it's really an issue. Your intended customer isn't some bloke running wordpress on a VPS, it's large scale enterprise and that's fine. If you want to soften that there's a few more things you'll need to change, but when combined with the above stuff about "production ready" it leaves a bit of a bad taste in my mouth, like you'd really rather I be paying you exorbitant rates to run this in your cloud than just using it.

[jabo]

I really appreciate that you took the time to write this detailed comment! Thank you!

> but for me one example of production looks like a raspberry pi in a school house in rural africa (internet in a box project)

This is an interesting perspective, one that I hadn't considered before. You're saying that software can be run in a variety of different environments and that the definition of what a "production" environment looks like is context-dependent.

My definition of "production" in the context of server software is that you typically run this software on a server or set of servers in some datacenter (think Redis, Postgres, MySQL, MongoDB, etc). In this context, I've always defined "production-ready" as:

1. Can it withstand infrastructure failures?

2. Is the API stable?

So when I say Meilisearch is not "production-ready", it's in this specific context - it can only be run on a single node, and it cannot handle infrastructure failures natively. So it could become single point of failure.

> This here is another spot where you seem biased. Remove the "despite v1.x versioning", it comes off as petty.

Historically I've seen server software has fault tolerance built-in when they reach v1.0, and it's a common assumption that I've seen engineers make. So I wanted to call attention to it... The phrasing of it comes across as petty, now that you mention it. I'll remove that.

> I get what you're saying about "production ready" but there must be another way to word it?

I think "fault tolerance" is a better word to describe what I had in mind. I'll update this.

> I don't think either of you support https.

Typesense does support https natively.

> Do you really not recommend the use of a reverse proxy? ... I guess you're assuming it's running on a stand alone computer with a public facing IP... ? Are you not providing a frontend/dashboard?

Yes to all your questions, except that Typesense does support HTTPS natively.

> You've made this sound like a draw back, if you had of put "None. Self-contained binary" in front of it like you did for yourself that would be fine but for this you mention a feature that you have while ignoring what looks to me like the same feature in your competitor.

I was actually going to add "None. Self-contained binary" for Meilisearch. But then their docs explicitly recommend using a reverse proxy in front: https://docs.meilisearch.com/learn/cookbooks/running_product...

With Typesense, we use h2o as the http library, which for eg Fastly exposes directly to internet-bound traffic and it's specifically built for handling high-volume traffic. This is why we feel comfortable recommending not putting a reverse-proxy in front of Typesense.

> Language support... This is also a bit confusing, and I can't help but think it's probably not completely honest. What makes meilisearch different so that it doesn't support "all languages", but elasticsearch does? Meilisearch certainly claims to support all languages where words are seperated by spaces, do you support languages that don't have words separated by spaces?

Yes, we support all languages that are space-separated. We also added support for CJK languages recently (which are not space-separated). I picked the phrasing you see under the Meilisearch column, from their docs: https://docs.meilisearch.com/learn/what_is_meilisearch/langu... (it used to read slightly different previously).

> Meilisearch is multilingual, featuring optimized support for: > Any language that uses whitespace to separate words > Chinese > Japanese > Hebrew > Thai > We aim to provide global language support, and your feedback helps us move closer to that goal.

> This user claims that meilisearch has better multi-language support: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34708802

We didn't support CJK languages in a GA release, until 2 weeks ago. So they are most likely talking about an earlier version of Typesense.

[traverseda]

Like I say, it's just my subjective gut reaction. I guess if there was one main take away it's "describe your competitors with the same language you'd use to describe yourself", where possible.

None, completely stand-alone with built in http(s) server | None, recommends a reverse proxy

As an example.

>So when I say Meilisearch is not "production-ready", it's in this specific context - it can only be run on a single node, and it cannot handle infrastructure failures natively. So it could become single point of failure.

And I don't really disagree with that, but it really is up to a judgement call on whoever is setting it up. If search isn't a critical feature than whoever is setting up might prefer meilisearch for it's memory model. For example I once worked on "the great canadian encyclopedia", which ran on a single VPS and needed search capability. It already had a single point of failure, so running search on the same VPS wasn't a big concern. There are also different roll-over policies, different uptime guarantees, different architectures, etc. If "production grade" was some kind of industry standard that would be one thing, but it really really does depend on the client.

I think that the single point of failure thing is a very important consideration, and should probably be in your overview along side the memory/data model, but I do honestly think typesense's memory-only disqualifies it from a lot of production systems I've worked on, and that meilisearch's single point of failure hasn't. Fault-tolerance and single point of failure deserves it's own row in your overview, it shouldn't be thrown into the use-case column.

Honestly it's only really an issue when taken all together, fix a few of those and you'll be in much better shape I think.