[pylucene-dev] JCC: switch and be happier

[Pete]

On Monday November 19 2007 3:55:29 pm Bill Peverill wrote:
> All [Pete, Andi, and Marc]
>
> Thanks for the quick replies..
>
> Are any of your implementations comparable in size to ours, running with
> JCC?
> How long have they been running? Are any running with windows server 2003?
> Are they fully stable now [no restarts required?]

We haven't ported yet, so I can't answer your questions.  As Andi notes 
however, PyLucene-JCC is much closer to Java Lucene b/c of the Sun/whoever 
JVM, and there are some honking huge Java Lucene deployments out there.

> In addition to figuring out how to solve the issue, it looks like we should
> be
> figuring out what problems we might have on the other side.

A piece of advice / rant:

Speaking from experience, whatever problems you encounter with PyLucene-JCC, I 
will be *shocked* if they are worse than what you are heading for with 
PyLucene-GCJ.  In spite of Andi's excellent work on PyLucene-GCJ (and I mean 
that sincerely), it is one of the single most difficult pieces of of software 
to work with that I have ever encountered.  To clarify, while the Python API 
is very nice, tweaking things at the GCJ level is quite difficult.  Couple 
that with a very challenging build process and you're in for a world of hurt.  
We literally spent over 3 man-months beating our heads against the problem 
you're now up against before settling on a less than ideal solution.  I wish 
I could give you a magic formula for optimizing GCJ memory performance, but I 
don't have one (and it probably wouldn't work on windows anyway).  At the end 
of the day, GCJ is just not a very good JVM.

Again, let me urge you (and anyone starting a new project / in a position to 
do so) to switch to the JCC branch.  While it is much newer, I've generally 
found Andi's code to be high quality and he's *very* responsive in terms of 
bugfixes & support.  For those with existing code, the conversion is 
realtively easy - I recently switched an 800 LOC library in about a day and a 
half; if I had unittests, it would have taken about half a day.

-- 
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