Remember it is not only a question of how long it takes for a query to execute - but whether that operation is blocking other queries. It is one thing for 100 people to each wait 10 seconds for a query to complete - quite another for the first person to wait 10 seconds and the last to wait 1000. I've seen this kind of behavior with php/mysql in a large production environment and it should be avoided obvsiosly. Dan
steven probably understands this better than anyone? can anything be done here, steven?
The only problem I know of is leading wildcards in search terms. These prevent the index on the word column from being used, hence a full table scan is done. This problem has gotten worse since the "try leading wildcards automatically if nothing was found" patch.
I have some architectural changes for search.module in my head which might help with this (though the main point is to introduce phrase searching), but I won't have time for this until my exams end.
Steven Wittens