[motorhaven]

Here's an idea for those with disk space (and index RAM to spare)...

What about 2 post tables? One without the fulltext index, and the other with it.

Searches would be pulled from the secondary post table with the fulltext index which would eliminate locking issues with the primary post table. Of course this would require every insert, update and delete to the post table to be duplicated to the secondary table.

I'm beginning to suspect the post table lock mentioned may, as noted previously, cause lock issues causing our front end server to sit in an I/O wait for the data. This would explain why the front end server sees a large load and the database doesn't.

I increased the key buffer size on the database server from 500 meg to 1 gigabyte and the query cache to 48 megabytes and saw no real difference on the database server but did see a load decrease on the front end server!

Just a thought.....