please please PLEASE fix searches!

[XXP]

Originally Posted by Marco van Herwaarden

See post #2

Thanks Marco,

I'm guessing that you're thinking of Mr. Luke's concern that "the [vB official] sites would have to be completely offline" for "several days to change all the databases". (emphasis added)

Good News! It is very possible that, that amount of downtime is not necessary.

It might be done with just a couple of hours -- or a few -- of "no new posts" time and a few minutes of actual down time to reload and restart.

The MySQL docs suggest that text search tables can be copied offline from the running database and then separately indexed, then differenced and replaced in the only briefly halted database.

There is some info on this in the MySQL docs for "Full-text Search Functions". For example: "A FULLTEXT index definition can be ... added later using ALTER TABLE or CREATE INDEX. For large data sets, it is much faster to load your data into a table that has no FULLTEXT index and then create the index after that, than to load data into a table that has an existing FULLTEXT index. "

It might be possible to mitigate the difference issue by pulling the copy at the beginning of low-peak and then running the index on a separate, dedicated and MySQL optimized machine. (The regular back-ups are probably run at the off-peak times already.)

A test run will tell you if actual significant downtime is necessary beyond a few hours of off-peak "no new posts" time.

Hope this is helpful. It would be so very helpful to have the shorter search terms.

An alternative for the vB.official sites might be to set up a dedicated in-house search [Google?] engine.

PS: the link above goes to the MySQL 3.x/4.x docs. The same info is in the 5.x docs and in the 6.x docs also.