Hacker News Reader

Comment by simplechris | Hacker News Reader

I am very interested in hearing about your experiences migrating to vespa. When it was opensourced we all thought it would be an absolute game-changer, but I see so few people building new products (or migrating existing products to) vespa.

View on HN

You can contact me. I'm also planning to do a blog post comparing with Solr and Elasticsearch. I think that naturally it takes some time to adopt a solution like that. And the ecosystem it still at it infancy. But, randomly, a project using Vespa appeared in my GitHub timeline today (https://github.com/rdoume/News_API). So, the adoption is increasing.

For me Vespa is a absolute game-change, in features and as someone said here, ES looks like it intentionally complicated to maintain. With nodes randomly getting unhealthy. Vespa is like Redis to me. I completely forgot about maintaining it and works great.

It makes a world of difference in our product, and I take every opportunity to evangelize it.

That's interesting to hear. Would love to read about how Vespa compares to Solr and ES.

This may be of interest to you: https://sematext.com/opensee/report/project/trend?q=ElasticS...

Would you happen to know how Vespa compares to ES in terms of memory or CPU footprint? Have you done apples to apples comparison by any chance?

I do not have a completely fair comparison. But a migration from Elasticsearch 5 (2016) to the Vespa 7 (2019) we reduced half of our nodes, and cut in half the average response time. Another amazing feature during the migration, is that Vespa allows you to reduce or increase the number of nodes dynamically. And it take full care about the data distribution. In ES we (used to) had to follow the limits of the pre-configured number of shards/replicas during the Index creation.

I have been wondering why Vespa isn't getting much traction. Everyone still defaults to ES, even in new project.

It should be marketed better, I feel. Some SEO for "Solr/lucene vs X" queries might help. I have been spending the last 3-4 months studying open source and commercial search systems, but it's only in this thread that I discovered Vespa.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com