I appreciate your help, but I have already read this. I find most of the documents on MySQL's website are not helpful to me. They are very technical and precise. Documents such as these are more likely to help me and is more what I was asking Erwin for:

http://www.howtoforge.com/mysql_database_replication
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2.../MySQLian.html

Please don't Google "mysql replication" and post the first link that comes up. I can do that myself.

the reference manual contains a step by step "How to Set Up Replication" which helped us setting it up...

How to put search on slave :
edit includes/config.php

put your slave config into this:

if (THIS_SCRIPT == search)
{

slave config goes here...

}

in vb 3.5x we had to do it slightly different (use a second master config for THIS_SCRIPT == search)
http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showp...93&postcount=9

You can do it that way but you end up replicating the whole database when you should only replicate user, forum, thread and post.

This way we can use it as a fallback db, in case the master dies...

For large forums is there any reason not to use InnoDB? If you use InnoDB, you also could also modify the forum searches to READ UNCOMMITTED and pickup some performance there without any locking at all.

InnoDB doesn't have FTS (Full text search) capabilities.

There is a patch though, it's linked on the full text forums on mysql.com.

Would love to hear from somebody if that works.

Erwin, can you explain pls how you did it?

I asked at vbulletin.com but:

Is anybody able to point me to a working hack to disable totally the search with thread results, enabling only post results? If I understand things correctly, it could do wonders for FullText searches...

Is it just a matter of editing templates or what?

I'm interested in that also, Erwin. Thanks.