Sphinx is one of the fastest of them, but the problem with Sphinx is this: updating the index will bring you to the same time as when creating a new index; so if you have a dynamic database and you need to keep the Index up to date, Sphinx is not a good choice and you should go with Xapian or Solr (Lucene)
Speed (request) Sphinx> Lucene> Xapian
consider working with a huge database other than average. you should read about MySQL full-text search, MyISAM, InnoDB, ...
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