[mute]

Before IB released info on 4.0, they said Sphinx was in the works. Later, when they came out and said "oh, no sorry, no sphinx" I called them out on it and finally got a more concrete answer. From what I've been able to gather, they DO have a Sphinx implementation for 4.0, but they aren't releasing it because they don't consider it finished.

My guess is that they aren't happy with the "search lag" associated with using Delta indexes, and that's why they are holding back. There are realtime updates for Sphinx in the pipeline, but it's not stable yet. Personally, I think it's really stupid that they are probably holding big boards back from upgrading because of the lag between indexes, which is an easy trade off compared to the terrible search performance of the default search.

We're running vb 3.6+backported security fixes with ~61 million posts and ~3.1 million threads. Our Sphinx implementation is based around the one from this thread, but I never got around to finishing it so that "Find all posts/threads by user" searches go to Sphinx. I'd love to have that functionality, but I don't really have the time to do it myself. We do a delta index every 5 minutes, and our users are a lot happier than they were years ago using the fulltext search. Granted, the Sphinx search that most of us are using is sort of crappy and doesn't take advantage of boolean operators and all the cool new stuff available in newer versions of Sphinx, but I'll take .5s search results over that stuff any day of the week.

Like most of you, we're not touching 4.0 with a 10 foot pole until they've figured out what they are doing and fix all of the performance issues 4.0 has, such as the search, or the hundreds of queries per page on the CMS side of things.

As for Searchlight, I like Floren and I think his product is probably great, but I'm not paying that either. Not because I don't have the money, but I just couldn't justify the expenditure with so little information about the product (I realize it's not final yet). Spending 10 times the cost of the vB license for a better search engine? Pass. I'll wait for someone in the community to work out a 4.0 version. Now that the search is full of hooks, you can hook in pre-search-query and return Sphinx results without a bunch of nasty file hacks. It's going to be a lot cleaner than it used to be. I think the only "difficult" part about the whole deal will be setting up Sphinx for people who are cpanel-junkies.

As for InnoDB, we've been running InnoDB on a handful tables for probably 5 years now, and don't have many real complaints about it, even with the drawbacks associated with it.