Redis on steroids: Autocomplete using Redis, Nginx and Lua

[cliveowen]

This implementation is too naive. You can't just autocomplete queries, you have to accept typos and errors and suggest the correct query. That's the hard part.

[taf2]

This is great need to figure out a good way to do request verification maybe to ensure the request it properly signed.

Update: this looks like a good article describing a verification scheme http://www.stavros.io/posts/writing-an-nginx-authentication-...

[leorocky]

The usual implementation for autocomplete is to generate a trie data structure. A naive implementation will not have auto-correction or fix problems more established implementations have already addressed.

[mholt]

True, but tries do not automatically solve those problems, either, and most tries use lots of memory, especially on 64-bit systems (pointers, pointers everywhere!).

[guiomie]

I'm currently implementing my own trie (for learning) for my own autocomplete module ... and I don't see how a trie (prefix tree) can solve the issues you just wrote.

[bithive123]

I love Redis, nginx, and Lua and wrote my own autocomplete implementation using Metaphone (e.g. https://github.com/threedaymonk/text) but after a while it became clear that what I really wanted was an instance of Solr.

[muxxa]

I wonder if replacing nginx+lua with http://webd.is/ would be faster (and maybe easier to deploy)?

[jzawodn]

Could be.

We build something similar using node.js and it's working quite well. Perhaps we can open source that someday...

[_bpo]

nginx+lua can be exceptionally fast. It's the basis for OpenResty, which is a consistent top-performer in the Web Framework Benchmarks (http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/)

Webdis is a neat project, but I'd be a bit wary of deploying a custom HTTP server written just for Redis interactions. Nginx is battle-hardened.