This latest release of Ferret has a lot of improvements. There have been substantial improvements to performance. Try it for yourself to see. I won't be publishing any numbers just yet. I will say though that it's still about 2-4 times slower than Lucene with the extension installed. There is also some performance improvements in the pure Ruby version if you haven't been able to install the C extension.

As well as working on the performance, the locking system has had a few changes to prevent some of the problems it has been causing people. Now, if you cancel a process while it has a lock open, the lock should still be released. Also, you can set the index to auto flush;

index = Index::Index.new(:auto_flush => true)

This will make sure no locks are kept open after updating the index. You won't need to call flush anymore. This is very useful if you have multiple processes modifying the index as you might have in a Rails application.

Also, it should now compile with the MSVC compiler on windows.


Changes:
* Added lock finalizer.
* Added :auto_flush option to Index::Index
* Many speed optimizations
* Fixed extension to compile on Windows.