Let me step back from sphinx performance and highlight first how Sphinx uses memory.

There are two different ways to store data in Sphinx (we call it indexes): on-disk and Real-Time index. Lets start with good old on-disk indexes.

Basically Sphinx on-disk index is simply a set of files generated by indexer during indexing process. All of them, except .spd and .spp are kept in memory for performance reasons. (more…)

As you might know Sphinx team are focused not only on full-text search improvements like blended characters support we introduced in 2.0.1-beta, we also cares about performance improvements. And one of the main questions on performance – how do you measure single query speed especially in scalable, distributed environment.
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