MarginaliaSearch/code

Code

This is a pretty large and diverse project with many moving parts.

You'll find a short description in each module of what it does and how it relates to other modules. The modules each have names like "library" or "process" or "feature". These have specific meanings. See doc/module-taxonomy.md.

Overview

A map of the most important components and how they relate can be found below.

The core part of the search engine is the index service, which is responsible for storing and retrieving the document data. The index serive is partitioned, along with the executor service, which is responsible for executing processes. At least one instance of each service must be run, but more can be run alongside. Multiple partitions is desirable in production to distribute load across multiple physical drives, as well as reducing the impact of downtime.

Search queries are delegated via the query service, which is a proxy that fans out the query to all eligible index services. The control service is responsible for distributing commands to the executor service, and for monitoring the health of the system. It also offers a web interface for operating the system.

Services

• core services Most of these services are stateful, memory hungry, and doing heavy lifting.
  • control
  • query
    • Exposes the functions/link-graph subsystem
    • Exposes the functions/search-query subsystem
  • index
    • Exposes the index subsystem
    • Exposes the functions/link-graph subsystem
  • executor
    • Exposes the execution subsystem
  • assistant
    • Exposes the functions/math subsystem
    • Exposes the functions/domain-info subsystem
• application services Mostly stateless gateways providing access to the core services.
  • api - public API gateway
  • search - marginalia search application
  • dating - https://explore.marginalia.nu/
  • explorer - https://explore2.marginalia.nu/

The system uses a service registry to find the services. The service registry is based on zookeeper, and is a separate service. The registry doesn't keep track of processes, but APIs. This means that the system is flexible to reconfiguration. The same code can in principle be run as a micro-service mesh or as a monolith.

This is an unusual architecture, but it has the benefit that you don't need to think too much about the layout of the system. You can just request an API and talk to it. Because of this, several of the services have almost no code of their own. They merely import a library and expose it as a service.

Services that expose HTTP endpoints tend to have more code. They are marked with (G).

Processes

Processes are batch jobs that deal with data retrieval, processing and loading. These are spawned and orchestrated by the executor service, which is controlled by the control service.

• processes
  • crawling-process
  • converting-process
  • loading-process
  • index-constructor-process

Features

Features are relatively stand-alone components that serve some part of the domain. They aren't domain-independent, but isolated.

• features-search
• features-crawl
• features-convert

Libraries and primitives

Libraries are stand-alone code that is independent of the domain logic.

• common elements for creating a service, a client etc.
• libraries containing non-search specific code.
  • array - large memory mapped area library
  • btree - static btree library