[RedWingFan]

Just looked at this again: if I try to change it back to fulltext, it will attempt to change the InnoDB tables back to MyISAM. Don't want that!

In the settings table, "fulltextsearch" has its "value" column set to "0". There are other parameters in that row. Think I'm safe to change "value" to "1" (and rebuild the datastore cache)?

I just have to comment that since changing tables back to InnoDB and implementing Sphinx, our forum runs SO much better now! I had fulltext previously. Searching for "Steve" as a search word, it would take 35-40 seconds to get results. (Steve is our forum's owner, so his name appears in most threads.) With Sphinx, the searches come back on average around 0.4 seconds. And with the InnoDB change, we don't have stacks of queries waiting in the queue anymore.

The only hiccup I've had is that I once again had a set of *.new.* files, this time for my post indexes. I killed and restarted searchd, and reran the update, and it all rotated properly. My clue was a forum member saying he couldn't search for his posts for the past few days. Sure enough, the stale indexes were dated around the time he was unable to find his posts. I may have to run a cron job to check for any *.new.* files in that directory, and possibly put together a shell script to kill and restart searchd.