Hi,
I managed to integrate sphinx 0.9.8 rc2 with my vbulletin board 3.70 quite easily thanks to this thread.
I followed the instructions here:
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showpost....&postcount=387
However the attached config file there was deprecated, I've updated it and attached my version below. I note that in vbulletin, the dateline and lastpost fields are stored as int(10) and not as a timestamp, hence I changed the config file to mark them as "sql_attr_uint" instead.
Also, as my board and database is running totally on utf-8 with some posts in CJK, so I have enabled CJK support in the attached config file as well, hope it is of use to someone
The sphinx.php files I found here seem to be partially buggy. ($coventry? empty arrays?) Will appreciate if someone can post a updated working version, especially for vB 3.7 ?
Lastly, I have converted my thread and post tables to INNODB, since there is now no need for the MYISAM FULLTEXT indices. Hopefully this will alleviate the table locking problems (no stats to show for though). Not sure if there are any repercussions in doing so
Background:
My forum is not exactly big, only about 300K posts but it is running on a very modest dedicated server with only 1G ram. A usual mysql fulltext search takes around 3-5 seconds, but my users tend to use the search gratuitously and it got so bad that I had to disable post body search.
Now with sphinx each search takes around 0.1-0.2 seconds, so everything's cool again.