Rebuilding the Sphinx index

[Wayne Luke]

From time to time, we will need to update the indexing schema for the Sphinx server. In order for this fix to take effect, you will need to update the sphinx schema for the index. Follow these steps to rebuild your Sphinx Search Schema.

1. Stop the Sphinx service on your server.
2. Replace your existing Sphinx configuration file (vbulletin-sphinx.php) with the one provided in the current version of vBulletin 5 Connect. You can find this file in the do_not_upload directory.
3. Update the file as provided in the instructions to create the vBulletin sphinx configuration file found in the sphinx installation instructions for your OS.
   • These files are sphinx_install_unix.txt and sphinx_install_windows.txt
4. Start the Sphinx service on your server.
5. Copy searchindex.php to from the do_not_upload directory to the root vBulletin directory on your server.
6. Run "php searchindex.php" from your server's command line. You will need to run this as a user with sufficient privileges to run Sphinx index commands.
   • You may have to use sudo on a Linux machine in order to have the proper permissions.
7. Select the correct vBulletin core directory (you can probably use the default) and choose to empty the search index (otherwise, the schema will not be recreated from the config)
8. When the indexing process is complete delete the searchindex.php file from your server.

[Wayne Luke]

Are you actually using Sphinx? It requires a third-party daemon to be installed on the server. If you are not using Sphinx then you will never need to rebuild its search index.

If you are using Sphinx Search, you will need to rebuild it every time we say it is necessary within the release notes. Otherwise searching will not work on your site.

[Zambfd]

Hi,

the search via sphinx does not consider a user account search, right? Why?

Also there is a problem with your default index file, if the forum has 40+ million entries in the closure table. You have to change the attribute entry for closure to this:

sql_attr_multi = uint closure from ranged-query; \
SELECT child, parent FROM closure WHERE child >= $start AND child <= $end; \
SELECT MIN(child), MAX(child) FROM closure

Or the indexer runs into a query timeout, regardless of the mysql/mariadb timeout settings.

[Wayne Luke]

None of vBulletin's search mechanisms consider a user to be content or searchable at this time.

For the query timeout, you should report a bug in the Bug Tracker linked in the header.