[eoc_Jason]

There's a few discussions over there, but the last official answer that I read was that Sphinx was NOT implemented in vB 4.0, with no acknowledgment that it would be implemented any time soon (or ever). I'm starting to seriously consider IPB as it has Sphinx compatibility...

Searching is the one crucial feature of a forum (or heck, even the Internet... Google anyone?) and I am appalled at how the vB team has been putting search features so low on their priority list (if it has even made the list)... Once a forum gets to a certain size, the built-in search becomes totally unusable because of table locking... I've complained for years on behalf of people with large sites, and have only fallen on deaf ears it seems.

It doesn't take much to crash a large vB forum using the built in search. When you do a search, depending on how you word it it can take a long, long time. Sadly if a result is not returned within a couple seconds people usually click the submit button again, and again, and again. Which does nothing but queue up in MySQL... Other people can still browse the forum just fine... UNTIL someone tries to submit a post/thread... When that happens then the submit is held in queue until the search finishes. Likewise every other query to the post table is held in queue because now there is a lock on the table... If your site is busy then you will quickly run out of mysql connections and probably http connections because everyone is "put on hold" till the one freaking search finishes...

A user isn't going to wait minutes for a search result.... Likewise it is not very feasible for a webmaster to get a second server exclusively as a slave search DB. Sphinx on the other hand can return results in a fraction of a second, and the program is FREE... *sigh*...

I'm still stuck on vB 3.6.x because that is the best sphinx code that is available at the moment. I've taken Orban's code and modified / improved it some, but I really don't want to try and tackle all the extra stuff of the newer vB... I don't know why I keep renewing my license, I'm paying for a product that I can't / won't upgrade to... I *thought* sphinx was going to be implemented in vB 4, but that was all false hopes...