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Recently I had the chance to work with the wonderful Lucene.net search indexing library to replace an already built MsSQL website search. The reason? Speed, flexibility, and a general altogether dislike for Microsoft products.

Now, I had heard that Lucene.net was fast, but that is never enough for me. I needed to see it for myself. So after a bit of coding all the classes that I needed to mock the existing system, I got them running side-by-side. For analysis I used Apache's amazing JMeter. If you aren't familiar with JMeter, it basically just tests something over and over and over again, as many times as you need for a given period of time or a select number of times. Below you will find the results.

The Test:
15 simultaneous connections repeatedly for about 15 minutes.

The Times:
It took the website about 7 seconds to initialize (both searches off), so in these tests we need to take that into consideration.
Lucene.net: 8 seconds - 7 seconds init time = 1.5 seconds!
MsSQL FullText: 29 seconds - 7 seconds init time = 22 seconds

The Verdict: Lucene take 1.5 seconds to do the same type of search that it takes FullText 22 seconds to accomplish!

I know, I know, it blew my mind too....

So, in short, if you are planing to implement some type of search into your application, do not overlook Lucene, it has some amazing flexibility, endless configurations, and, well, it's free.

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