Need for speed with eZ Find
This tutorial should give eZ Publish developers some new ideas on how to use eZ Find. The ever growing need for speed can be achieved by using eZ Find search function instead of standard content list/tree fetch functions. Solr engine, used by eZ Find, is far more superior regarding read speed than mysql (at least in the way eZ Publish uses them). This fact becomes apparent when dealing with 10 or 100 thousands of objects in your database with complicated eZ Publish SQL queries starting to slow down rapidly. If you need text search capabilities difference in read speed becomes even more obvious.
Introduction
The main goal here is to replace standard content list/tree template fetch functions (which use SQL queries) with eZ Find search fetch function (which uses the Solr indexing engine ). Reason for this is to gain more speed as Solr is way faster in case of large site with 10 thousands of objects or more. Additional benefit is the text searching capability of Solr, which can be used to enrich functionalities available on the website. There are some drawbacks and some situations where Solr search fetch function cannot be used for replacing standard eZ Publish fetch functions, and these will be covered.
This tutorial could be even more usable in the future because of the direction where eZ Find development is headed, as it will be possible to store entire objects in the Solr index. In this case it will not be needed to use database at all, in order to fetch content nodes.
This is demo content, to continue real reading, please visit share.ez.no
About the author : Ivo Lukač
Working at Netgen, Zagreb, Croatia
Tech: CMS, eZ Publish, eZ Find, PHP, Linux, MySQL, Apache, Varnish
Services: system architecture, consulting, development, support, maintenance, upgrades
