Feature: Postgres full text search instead of elasticsearch

I’m looking at running Zammad for our company, but elasticsearch taking 2GB of ram on idle just for some full text search is ridiculous. I’ve tried scaling the heapsize down for elastic and then it just broke and I had to wipe the data to make it work again.

We currently don’t generate that many tickets and are looking for a light weight solution that isn’t going to cause big problems. Would you guys be interested in replacing elastic full text search with postgres full text search behind a feature flag? Would you accept such a PR?

Hi Brendan - ES actually is an optional requirement. You can use Zammad without the ES which will fall back to regular SQL queries. However, they are quite slow as you can imagine and will affect the overall performance of Zammad. Additionally the reporting won’t work :chart_with_upwards_trend:

You can disable the ES and activate the SQL fallback by running the following command in the Zammad rails console:

Setting.set('es_url', nil)

Hi @thorsteneckel thanks for the tip. When you say regular SQL queries I’m guessing that doesn’t mean it uses Postgres’s full text search features?

Hi @BrendanBall - that’s right. We use ElasticSearch for more than just the full text search. Just search for SearchIndexBackend.enabled? in the codebase and you’ll find all occurrences where a SQL fallback is is place. However, please be aware of that Zammad comes with two powerful features that may make the integration harder:

1.) We support PostgreSQL and MySQL - so there would be a need to support MySQLs full text search as well
2.) Zammad allows to dynamically add database columns of various types aka ObjectManager::Attribute-s

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