I wanted to get serenata to index a repo without me having to use emacs. I ended up using ngrep to see the jsonrpc calls that emacs was sending to serenata.
Also, I felt link indexing was taking too long to start up and, so, when I did an strace on serenata, I discovered that it was doing infinite recursion on a symlink that I had pointing to the directory it was sitting in.
Anyway, after clearing up the symlink, it is indexing a lot faster now. I'll let you know if it uses the SQLite files it created when I start load a php file when it is done.