[mute]

Hm. this is very strange. I have verified that my config is the same as yours (minus the names of the indexes), and have emptied my sphinx_counter table, nuked all my indexes, and rebuilt.

[root@db2 var]# /home/httpd/sphinx/bin/search -c /home/httpd/sphinx/etc/sphinx.conf purple
Sphinx 0.9.6
Copyright (c) 2001-2006, Andrew Aksyonoff

- loaded 591 stopwords from '/home/httpd/sphinx/etc/sphinx.stopwords'
index 'vbpostidx': query 'purple ': returned 0 matches of 0 total in 0.000 sec
- loaded 591 stopwords from '/home/httpd/sphinx/etc/sphinx.stopwords'
index 'vbpostdeltaidx': query 'purple ': returned 0 matches of 0 total in 0.000 sec
- loaded 591 stopwords from '/home/httpd/sphinx/etc/sphinx.stopwords'
index 'vbthreadidx': query 'purple ': returned 0 matches of 0 total in 0.000 sec
- loaded 591 stopwords from '/home/httpd/sphinx/etc/sphinx.stopwords'
index 'vbthreaddeltaidx': query 'purple ': returned 0 matches of 0 total in 0.000 sec

I broke something, but I don't know what

Ah, I found the problem I think.

For whatever reason, on my initial index, despite having used --rotate, it is leaving *new* index files in my var dir:

[root@db2 var]# ls -la *new*
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1356935444 Oct 2 13:39 vbpost.new.spd
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 10644727 Oct 2 13:39 vbpost.new.spi
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 54322284 Oct 2 13:42 vbthread.new.spd
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 879893 Oct 2 13:42 vbthread.new.spi

Sphinx won't search against these, but I'm not sure why they didn't roll over.