Hello,

Time for some updating.

We had a new searchsystem, it was a pain to get it. The reason is that the computer has to perform a one time operation on a huge amount of data. The host, being a master on this computer, had to pull some tricks to get it done.

The operation took just a few minutes on my Pentium, but it drained all memory and required about a GigaByte in c:\Windows\temp. It was on, so staff could test it out (would be a shame to blow the entire server), but I was forced to delete it again during the last downtime. Server just refused to load it. The database got rid of 200,000 OT posts now.

I guess it's back to the drawing table as far as Search is concerned, queries can take up a few seconds and they are performed on the same tables as used to store your posts in. This can lock up the tables, which will cause a forum downtime. This is a problem for many larger sites and while we are not that large, our database is definately not 8 Gig in size, our hardware is not what those guys use either.

The not so great performance of the Search (20 seconds while 1 person can use it is not that fast) may be related to something else, for now it's gone while we'll monitor performance of the bare system. Still looking around for improvements. For now you'll have to use the Google search, which is surprisingly fast and returns more results than before.

I'm looking into creating a partial forumsearch (say limited to RTW and modding forums). Should be smaller and just work.

Added a tiny tweak that should help narrowband: CSS files are stored in files and no longer served from the database. It's only 6 kb, but it's cached in your temporary internet directory now instead of downloading it again and again.