Using Rails 3.2, Thinking Sphinx 3.0.6, Sphinx 2.2.4-id64-beta.
I am setting up a dedicated database server for my app. May I know the following:
/path/to/app/server/current/config/thinking_sphinx.yml
correct:
address: database_server_ip_address
pid_file: /path/to/app/server/shared/pids/searchd.pid
indices_location: /path/to/app/server/shared/db/sphinx
configuration_file: /path/to/app/server/shared/config/production.sphinx.conf
It probably depends on where you want to avoid latency. If it's on the database server, then indexing will be fast, but search queries may be a bit slow (granted, they're just facing the same hit that database queries are, so I'd hope that was negligible either way). If indexing's not too hard and you want that extra touch of speed, then having Sphinx on your web server might be better.
That said, you're more likely to scale up the number of web servers, so having a single Sphinx daemon on the database server is probably the better way to go.
As for the options - they look correct (the paths are outside of the current
directory or any specific release). You'll just want to make sure the actual directories exist.