
Ask HN: Elasticsearch vs. SOLR? - AznHisoka
Has anyone got any experience with both of these? Which one would you recommend?<p>I have a new project where I want to store logs and search those logs by keyword, and eventually do visualizations on the performance of my app based on these logs.
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PaulHoule
I have been involved with some complex SOLR customizations such as Asian
languages, probabilistic IR and neural ranking functions, etc. I have been
proud of the end product but at the cost of blood, sweat and tears. To be
fair, a lot of this was in the Lucene 3 era, in which doing anything
interesting with the ranking function would be a big pain and probably wreck
performance.

I haven't done anything that advanced with Elasticsearch but the #1 theme is
that Elasticsearch is really easy in terms of development and operations. I
know people that have developed plugins for ES that are pretty clean so I
think advanced customization is easier than it used to be, but a lot of that
is a matter of Lucene 4.

If you are working with logs and interested in visualization you should check
out Kibana and also Kibi

[https://siren.solutions/kibi/](https://siren.solutions/kibi/)

which is a greatly powered-up fork of Kibana.

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caw
We moved everything from SOLR to Elasticsearch about a year ago. We were
already using Elasticsearch for data visualizations, but SOLR was our text
search. Elasticsearch supported that, and we were able to add more language
analyzers to support our use-case.

On the admin side, SOLR was a black box to everyone but one person on the
team. If a node dies, there needs be another election, and Zookeeper needs to
be updated. Restart nodes too fast and we ended up masterless a few times.
Elasticsearch is much much better on leader elections and backups, though
status going to red on new index creation is obnoxious. That supposedly will
be fixed soon.

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vvpan
Perhaps not the best question for HN. But I used both a year ago and did not
see a single thing in SOLR that ES didn't do better. Starting from
documentation to ease of configuration and querying, features... Documentation
alone was worth the switch. Overall it seems to me that SOLR is a technology
that's on it's way out.

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AznHisoka
Thanks, it seems to me that Elasticsearch has better documentation as well.

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jkestelyn
Really good write-up (about a year old) on precisely that subject, here:

[https://sematext.com/blog/2015/01/30/solr-elasticsearch-
comp...](https://sematext.com/blog/2015/01/30/solr-elasticsearch-comparison/)

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nreece
If your requirement is mainly indexing and search, then the performance of
Sphinx ([http://sphinxsearch.com](http://sphinxsearch.com)) will be must
better, even for large amounts of data.

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cdnsteve
I'm looking at replacing a few GSA appliances with either of these for
indexing private user content (so users can search their own data). Anyone
have experience with this on these and how has it been?

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kristoff_it
Unless you like XML and convoluted documentation, go for ES.

