In what ways are Manticore and Sphinx diverging?

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I noticed yesterday that a week before Manticore 6 dropped, Sphinx also released its first new version in more than a year and a half, 3.5.1. Comparing the changelogs of the two, it seems like there is little and maybe no overlap in their development? From an outsider’s perspective, I would expect and assume there would be at least a little parallel evolution. I am curious, what is Sphinx changing into, versus Manticore’s evolution?

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it seems like there is little and maybe no overlap in their development?

I was surprised to find that there are actually a few similarities between our developments, such as per-index binlog, mysqldump support, “datadir”, plain → sphinxql log format change, insert/replace logging, and max_matches optimizations.

From an outsider’s perspective, I would expect and assume there would be at least a little parallel evolution

While I cannot speak for the Sphinx team’s priorities, I can assume that their optimizations for the biggest classifieds website in Russia, https://avito.ru/, influenced their development choices towards hybrid search and ranking. I can also assume that’s why Sphinx is not open source anymore.

On the other hand, our priorities as an independent and open-source project come from a combination of feedback we receive from users on different public channels and GitHub, as well as our own goals. For example, we want Manticore to be a replacement for Elasticsearch in the ELK stack (and Opensearch’s similar stack), which means we must address critical things like:

  • integration with Logstash, Beats, Kibana - that’s why we invented Manticore Buddy
  • authentication and access control - again Buddy will help
  • higher ingestion throughput and parallel tables optimization to be able to process large amounts of logs
  • further performance improvements to make Manticore even faster than Elasticsearch.
  • and other things
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The Manticore project is evolving very well:
https://www.openhub.net/p/manticoresearch/

Given Manticore is Open Source, the Sphinx project can absorb some of the innovations. But that is unsustainable.

Related:

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