Large Searchindex
 

On my forum the postindex table is currently holding 24.9 million records.

I'm getting quite a few:-
MySQL Error : Got a packet bigger than 'max_allowed_packet' bytes Error Number : 1153
errors lately being sent to the forum email address. The email also tell me the user name of the member who 'caused' the error. After a little investigation it has emerged the the user was doing a search when this error occurred.

My site has approximately 1.4 million posts, would emptying and rebuilding the search indexes improve the search performance and would it have an adverse effect on the search results after?

I'm running 3.6.8

Thanks

move to 3.7 and use FULLTEXT indexation instead... you will spare 24.9 entries in the database.

there is no other solution.

Nexialys, 3.6.8 offers Fulltext search, doesn't it?

I am currently using the vBulletin search engine, could I just not switch to the Fulltext that 3.6.8 offers and then upgrade to 3.7 or 3.8 later?

And do you mean that doing this will remove the 24.9 million entries? :up:

when you switch to FullText, the 24.9M entries are deleted... the process indicate you how. what i mean by going to 3.7 is that the Search engine inside vB will be faster because the code changed... in 3.6 is have some lacks of static search, making your server to run slower and require more resources... (that's why we upgrade usually, to make it better)

sure you can use the FullText in 3.6 :)

It would remove the vB index, but it will be replaced with the MySQL fullsearch index, which will also be large (but probably smaller).