Usage¶

The commands generated from building are distributed in the run directories of most modules. And a lot of commands are named test-*.out (such as blob-index/run/test-blob-index.out), they are for testing purpose. Other commands are utility or exporting commands to be used by search engine users (e.g. searchd/run/searchd.out).

Here we only list a few commands that are considered important commands and they offer useful functionalities.

In general, you can issue command -h in most important commands to see its command line options and usage description.

Tex parser¶

Run our TeX parser to see the corresponding operator tree of a math expression. And often this command is used to investigate a TeX grammar parsing error in the indexing process described later.

Below is an example of parsing $$\dfrac a b + c$$.

$./tex-parser/run/test-tex-parser.out edit: \frac a b +c return string: no error (max path ID = 3). return code: 0 Operator tree: └──(plus) #5, token=ADD, subtr_hash=33891', pos=[6, 12]. │──(frac) #4, token=FRAC, subtr_hash=3275', pos=[6, 9]. │ │──#1[normala'] #1, token=VAR, subtr_hash=a', pos=[6, 7]. │ └──#2[normalb'] #2, token=VAR, subtr_hash=b', pos=[8, 9]. └──[normalc'] #3, token=VAR, subtr_hash=c', pos=[11, 12]. Suffix paths (leaf-root paths/total = 3/4): - [path#1, leaf#1] normala': VAR(#1)/rank1(#0)/FRAC(#4)/ADD(#5) * [path#1, leaf#4] 0f63: FRAC(#4)/ADD(#5) - [path#2, leaf#2] normalb': VAR(#2)/rank2(#0)/FRAC(#4)/ADD(#5) - [path#3, leaf#3] normalc': VAR(#3)/ADD(#5) (fingerprint 0005)  Type \ followed by Tab to auto-complete some frequently used TeX commands Crawler¶ A Python script crawler (demo/crawler/crawler-math.stackexchange.com.py) is included specifically for crawling math stackexchange. Users are asked to write their own crawlers if they are trying to crawl data from other websites. Install BeautifulSoup4 used by demo crawler. $ apt-get install python3-pip
$pip3 install BeautifulSoup4  Debian users may also need to install pycurl: $ apt-get install python3-pycurl


To crawl math stackexchange from page 1 to 3:

$cd$PROJECT/demo/crawler
$./crawler-math.stackexchange.com.py --begin-page 1 --end-page 3  Crawler will output all harvest files (in JSON) to ./tmp directory which is a conventional directory name for output and will be deleted if you issue make clean. You can press Ctrl-C to stop crawler in the middle of crawling process. The output of crawler for each post will have two files, one is *.json corpus file (for now it contains URL and plain text of the post extracted by crawler), another is *.html file, which is for previewing this post corpus. (to preview it, connect to Internet and open it with your browser) As an option, you can skip the time-consuming crawling process by directly downloading a small size corpus (around 7 MB) to play around later using indexer. This small corpus contains 1000 pages we previously crawled from math stackexchange. Another crawler script crawler-artofproblemsolving.com.py is available for crawling artofproblemsolving.com. Shout out to @TheSil for contributing that! More crawler scripts are coming out, see our plan here. Indexer¶ After corpus is generated by crawler. Indexer is used to index a single corpus file or a corpus/collection directory recursively. $ cd $PROJECT/indexer$ ./run/indexer.out -p ./test-corpus 2> error.log


test-corpus is a test corpus manually written for specific testing purpose. To index the corpus you have just generated by invoking crawler, issue:

$./run/indexer.out -p ../demo/crawler/tmp/ 2> error.log  Again, the output (resulting index) is generated under ./tmp directory except when you specify -o option to name a output directory. If you are using indexer to add new documents into existing index in multiple runs, you need to ensure that the newly added documents are not previously indexed. Otherwise duplicate document may occur in search results. (Current indexer does not support index document update) If you are indexing a corpus with Chinese words, use -d option to specify CppJieba dictionary path when calling indexer.out. This will slow down indexing but it enables searcher/searchd to search Chinese terms later (also have to to specify -d in searcher/searchd). Note it is required to have typically at least 1 GB of memory for our indexer to successfully run through a non-trivial size of corpus without being killed by the OS. Indexd¶ indexd is the daemon version of indexer, example run commmand: $ ./run/indexd.out -o ~/nvme0n1/mnt-mathtext.img/ > /dev/null 2> error.log


Like indexer, -o option specifies the output directory.

Script indexer/scripts/json-feeder.py is provided to feed json files under some directory recursively to a running indexd. Show usage from --help option:

$./scripts/json-feeder.py --help usage: json-feeder.py [-h] [--maxfiles MAXFILES] [--corpus-path CORPUS_PATH] [--indexd-url INDEXD_URL] Approach0 indexd json feeder. optional arguments: -h, --help show this help message and exit --maxfiles MAXFILES limit the max number of files to be indexed. --corpus-path CORPUS_PATH corpus path. --indexd-url INDEXD_URL indexd URL (optional).  Single query searcher¶ To test and run a query on the index you have just created, run a single-query searcher that takes your query, searches for relevant documents and exits immediately. There are three single-query search programs available: • A transitional full-text searcher which only searches terms (i.e. regular text without math-expressions), located at search/run/test-term-search.out. • A math-only searcher which only searches math expressions, located at search/run/test-math-expr-search.out • A mixed-query searcher which handles both math-expression and term queries, located at search/run/test-search.out Given mixed-query searcher as an example, to run mixed-query searcher with a test query “function” and TeX “$$f(x) = x^2 + 1$$” on index ../indexer/tmp, issue: $ cd $PROJECT/search$ ./run/test-search.out -i ../indexer/tmp -t 'function' -m 'f(x) = x^2 + 1'


This searcher returns the first “page” of top-K relevant search results (relevant keywords are highlighted in console). You can use -p option to specify another page to be returned.

Please refer to command -h output for how to use the other two searcher commands.

Search daemon¶

On the top of our search engine modules is search daemon program searchd, located at searchd/run/searchd.out. It runs as a HTTP daemon that deals with every query (in JSON) sent to it and return search results (in JSON too), never exits unless you hit Ctrl-C.

The whole point of daemonize search service is for efficiency. This is very easy to understand because there are obviously large overheads in loading dictionary, and setting up necessary search environment. Among those, the most significant thing is caching.

Indeed, our searchd can be specified to cache a portion of index posting into memory (currently only term index, future will support math index too). You can specify the maximum cache limit using -c option followed by a number (in MB). Current default cache limit is just 32MB.

To run searchd,

$cd$PROJECT/searchd
$./run/searchd.out -i <index path> &  You can then test searchd by running curl scripts existing in searchd directory: $ ./scripts/test-query.sh ./tests/query-valid.json


To shutdown searchd, type command

$kill -INT <pid>  Search daemon cluster¶ Search deamon can scale to multiple nodes across multiple cores or machines. This functionality is implemented using OpenMPI. To run two instances on single machine, you need to copy index images to avoid index corruption. The search results from all nodes are merged and returned from master node. Scaling can be used to reduce search latency by searching on multiple smaller segments of original indices. Also, as each instance produces its own log files, it is highly recommanded to run binaries in different folders, one can do this by simply creating two folders and symbolic binaries in each of them. One example command to run 3 instances over two single machines, with local machine runing 2 instances and a remote host runing 1 instance: $ mpirun --host localhost,localhost,192.168.210.5 \
-n 1 --wdir ./run1 searchd.out -i ../mnt-demo.img/ -c 800 : \
-n 1 --wdir ./run2 searchd.out -i ../mnt-demo2.img/ -c 800 : \
-n 1 --wdir /root ./searchd.out -i ./mnt-demo3.img/ -c 1024


If you are using a different SSH port for remote host, remember to edit /etc/ssh/ssh_config and configure ssh client:

Host 192.168.210.5
Port 8985


And to prevent remote host prompting for password, copy ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub of localhost and append to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys in remote host.

To stop all nodes in a cluster gracefully:

\$ killall -USR1 searchd.out
`