Performance difference between sunspot and thinking sphinx

I read an article comparing the performance of sunspot and thinking sphinx ( http://开发者_StackOverflowwww.vijedi.net/2010/ruby-full-text-search-performance-thinking-sphinx-vs-sunspot-solr/ ). As per the article sunspot drags a lot behind thinking sphinx since it uses xml to interact with java layer. This is the result mentioned there

Runs    Thinking Sphinx       Sunspot
5000              38.49       1611.60
10000             38.54       1648.51
15000             39.06       1614.52
20000             38.86       1583.53
25000             39.78       1613.79
30000             38.83       1595.60
35000             38.34       1571.96
40000             38.06       1631.87
45000             37.57       1603.31
50000             38.23       1634.53
Total            385.80      16109.26

Is there really such a difference? Is sunspot really slower? or is the article just biased? Which Full Text Search Engine would you guys recommend?

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If you look at the comments on that article, it seems that the author is not biased, but that the times aren't a reliable comparison of the two libraries.

I'm the author of Thinking Sphinx, so of course I think it's a viable option and should serve you well - but sometimes Solr (or a different option again) will be a better fit. Both Thinking Sphinx and Sunspot are well-maintained and used widely - certainly, Thinking Sphinx supports Rails 3 and 3.1 and won't be disappearing any time soon.

I would recommend trying one or the other out, seeing how it works - unless you're dealing with a site that's massive, then search is unlikely to be a bottleneck, so go with what you feel more comfortable with.