Sphinx Search

[eoc_Jason]

Originally Posted by kontrabass

Thanks for the report! Mind if I ask a couple questions (gathering info to see where I would stand): Are you running a slave DB server for searches? What kind of hardware is behind your database? Thanks

No, just one single server. Dual Woodcrest (4 cores total) & 4GB RAM. A slave server was an initial consideration, but even if there was a slave server the mysql fulltext searches would not have run any faster really. It would of only alieviated the locking on the master db.

Depending on what people searched before, queries could of taken several minutes (and we all know nobody waits that long for a web page to load). Queries like that would cause the post table to be locked and thus anyone trying to post would of also been sitting waiting until the search compelted. Usually people got impatient too and would click the search button several times, only queuing up the searches even more.

Until I installed this sphinx search mod, the only course of action was to have a custom script that would kill any search queries that took over 60 seconds (to prevent the issues above).

Yes everything on the server was extremely optimized, and I even had to set the mysql fulltext min characters to 5, and max to like 12-15 I think it was.

Basically the only two things out there is sphinx & mnogosearch mods for vB. I chose this one because it was the most transparent. Now searches are usually done in way under 1 second, and even though the results could sometimes be out of (date) order, it still works a million times better than before.

I plan on installing this on my own forum too, as searches are starting to cause issues.

Searching is one of the last weak points of vBulletin and really needs to be addressed.

Originally Posted by raywjohnson

Thanks for the help!

After I read your post I restarted searchd and preformed command line and forum search again, but the results were the same. I indexed -all as well and tried again, no joy!

Do you know of any settings in vBulletin that would limit the search results?

Did you increase your max results in both the sphinx and the other php api file? Also I think vBulletin might have some limits in the control panel. I don't know which all are used for searching as I haven't had time to really look through all the underlying code with sphinx. I just got it up and running and have been letting it do it's own thing.

vB also does a lot of weighting and will toss out low results (irritating as it can produce no results even when there are). I do not know if this is still used with sphinx though, if it is then that probably explains your issue.