The Codfather Posted April 21, 2001 Share Posted April 21, 2001 I like the new look of the forum, but I'm a little disappointed by the speed (or lack of it) of the search engine. It seems to be taking a lot longer than it did on the old forum. In this case, I was just looking for a subject title, and was still waiting 5 minutes to churn out 19 hits. I shudder to think what would happen if I was looking for something in the body of the thread... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dirtweasle Posted April 21, 2001 Share Posted April 21, 2001 Just tried searching for "smoke" and it took a very long time though it did work. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Maximus Posted April 21, 2001 Share Posted April 21, 2001 Well if you had to search through nearly 250,000 posts, you'd be slow too. Nah, I know what you mean, just couldn't pass that up. Yeah it is slower than it was. I also don't like the fact that you have to know the Member's member# in order to search for their posts. [ 04-20-2001: Message edited by: Maximus ] Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JMcGuire Posted April 21, 2001 Share Posted April 21, 2001 <BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Maximus: Well if you had to search through nearly 250,000 posts, you'd be slow too.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE> Actually, you'd be slow if you had to search using CGI and PERL against a flat-file database, which is how this software (InfoPop's Ultimate BBS) works. Only then does a small number of records like 250K really make any difference. InfoPop does offer OpenTopic which runs against an Oracle database, but I must assume (hope... pray) that this isn't that. Seriously, I'm 99% sure this isn't their OpenTopic software (judging from the feature list). Around last year I coincidentally wrote a piece of similar discussion software for internal use at my company. It ran against SQL Server and I tested on an unexciting single proc P3 400 with a 30GB RAID5 drive (sounds exotic but it isn't), and I could search three million messages returning an average of 10 matches in under two seconds. CGI is bad because it kicks off new processes for every request (which is why heavy workloads use brokered middleware). PERL would be bad if they had high volumes of simultaneous search requests but I doubt that applies here. Flat-file is bad because it ignores three decades of database indexing advances (which is why only mainframes normally still use flat-file DBs for large datasets). So now you know why the searches are slow. Unfortunately, this also means they probably won't get any better, and in fact, they'll probably continue to get worse. Please understand I'm not slamming BTS or the admins, I'm just trying to explain why it's so slow. Given these absolute problems, I would assume the only reasonable way to fix it would be to throw tons of hardware at it (short of splurging for OpenTopic and Oracle, about $20K plus significant time and effort). Actually, I'm not even sure if OpenTopic would run on the current system since they're running Linux -- I can't remember if Oracle has taken that plunge yet. Probably not. So then they'd be looking at springing for (and installing and learning) some new flavor of UNIX, too. Repeat after me: Slow Searches Are In My Future. Countdown to topic-lock: 5, 4, 3... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Maximus Posted April 21, 2001 Share Posted April 21, 2001 OK Doug Beman, er, I mean JMcGuire. Nice way to kill a thread. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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