I wish I could get django-haystack working…
Last night on a whim, I decided that I wanted to tie search into an application I was writing. I whipped together the models, wrote an importer for the raw data (the database files are 360 megabytes on disk, and the table with the main data has five thousandish records to give you an example of the size), and let it import.
While the importer is running, I started looking into searching. I had heard about Haystack on an episode of Django Dose, and started down that road. First I tried getting Solr to work, and had the experience that is typical with getting WARs to work for me. I gave up on that after having issues with Solr (almost certain they were PEBCAK) and went for Whoosh. Whoosh seemed to work fairly well, and the index update wasn't using that much memory (something I noticed with Solr). (In Solr's defense, I had even less idea what I was doing at that point, and didn't realize the batch size argument.)
When it actually came time to running a search query though, I managed to go into swap death.
Don't read this post. I'm tired and frustrated, and I still think Haystack is awesome and I just suck.