The "good" news is that table locking has been removed from the equation in 4.0. But still, as you said, no user on today's internet is going to sit there for close to a minute waiting for search results. Heck, it'd be a lot more than a minute on my forums, doing a fulltext search on 7 million posts!
I think VB is hesitant to use Sphinx because they don't have control over it. It's not *their* product. The thinking is probably that if Sphinx for some reason becomes unsupported or ceases to exist, VB is crippled.
But I say, if they don't want to incorporate Sphinx, fine -
at least create a plugin that is easy to implement, so that if their big-boarding clients have no other option, at least they can upgrade to VB 4.0 instead of moving to IPB.
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I just checked out this official doc from IPB:
http://community.invisionpower.com/r...tml?record=181
Wow, that's what I'm looking for. Sure, the user needs to have root server access (probably another reason VB doesn't officially support Sphinx), but what big-boarder seriously is not going to have root access???? No board with 5+ million posts is going to be on a shared $10/month hosting plan.
IPB makes it so easy to use Sphinx, I'm seriously looking at converting even though I've been with VB for 10 years.