[eoc_Jason]

Guys, the bulk of the "slowdown" is/was simply the search of the post fulltext index. If your system lags doing other things (like finding all posts by username - with no query text) then you should probably look into optimizing MySQL and/or getting a little bit beefer hardware.

Searching by tag or prefix + keyword shouldn't be too much of an issue. You should be able to add tag info to sphinx and can add a conditional. Alternately you could just search the sphinx index for all results then run a seconday query afterwards pruning out the results that don't match a tag or prefix.

I do plan on upgrading to vB 3.7, so I am definitly going to make sphinx work.