Unfortunately I paid someone else to set it up so I don't have all the detailed tech info. It was a feature that I had back when I used zeroforum and wanted in vb. It really should be built in to vbulletin.

You can see it in action at http://forums.corvetteforum.com

Thanks Troy.

The way I solve this is to offload search to a slave database that replicates the relevant tables. 26 million posts.

We used to use a dedicated search machine. That can work very well also.

One benefit we found with the archived data method is that if we run into a problem on the live data it's a lot easier to run utilities to fix it. A smaller database is easier to fix when things go wrong.

The archived data is not as likely to have problems since it is read only. Of course you do have other drawbacks like not being able to edit/delete a thread through normal methods once it is archived.

Does this require a separate server or is there still a benefit to doing this on the same server that houses the forum? I would imagine it would free up table locks, etc even if it was on the same server.

-vissa

Different server. You could put it on the same server to free up table locks, but make sure you have enough CPUs/RAM to handle it. I prefer to offload it to a different box.

Hi Erwin,
thanks for sharing. we already have a slave db server and would like / need to offload search there due to the locking issues (3M posts)

How did you tellvb to use the slave for searching? did you modify config.php or search.php? Any help is appreciated,
Thomas

Different ways to do it - for me, I modified search.php quite extensively (I'm running a vB-based Wiki off that slave too).

Erwin, where could I learn more about MySQL replication? If we wanted to offload search to a separate database server, we would need to use MySQL replication, correct? The search database server would be a slave server. I am unsure how to set this up. Any advice? Tips? Pointers? URLs? Thanks. :)

<a href="http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/replication.html" target="_blank">http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/replication.html</a>