SphinxSearch Experience

At work I have been investigating alternative search engines to manage our class schedule needs. Currently our credit schedule is 8 years old in design and requires file query caching to keep it running properly. We are wanting to get more information out of the database to make it easier for students to find classes they want to take that fits in their schedule. One options is to have filtering options like on many ecommerce sites.

So I heard about SphinxSearch and how fast it indexes and produces query results. So this is great. Well it hasn't been as great of an experience trying to get it integrated into our non-credit system.

Problems:
1) Documentation is lacking. More detailed examples of many of the advanced features would be helpful.
2) PHP API is extremely slow.
3) It only deals with numbers (makes more work on me)

But after learning the system figuring out its quirks. Working around some bugs (might be solaris or sparc related) I am beginning to be more confident. I have also just started investigating the Sphinx PECL extention to see about speed improvements for parsing of the server response. During an initial test (FreeBSD Dual Dual Core Xeon 2.8Ghz 2GB Ram Server) a response using the PHP API cost 0.1 sec whereas the PECL version only cost 0.003 sec. Now these numbers are different than I was receiving on our solaris server but non the less its a huge improvement. I need to refine my testing to verify my results and I will post more details about them when I am more comfortable with what I have.