difficulty loading search engine

phobic · Post by **phobic** » Wed Mar 08, 2006 4:53 am

hi

does anyone else have problems running the search engine on this site? i've just registered and have been trying to search for help with an stdm cable problem, but i can't seem to get any results. it just keeps defaulting to the intial search page.

any ideas?

astroman · Post by **astroman** » Wed Mar 08, 2006 7:37 am

stdm is a very common item, maybe the function times out / overflows with too many results ?
Afaik there (possibly) was a modification recently as it was used with an empty search to find the most recent entries - I don't remember the details.
If you narrow your search a bit, like restrict it to problem forum only, then it should work.
there may be additional hits when it's written s/tdm

welcome

and cheers, tom

Aries · Post by **Aries** » Wed Mar 08, 2006 8:23 am

stdm search returns results in about 1 to 2 minutes!!.

John Cooper · Post by **John Cooper** » Wed Mar 08, 2006 1:53 pm

I just tried and it works ok for me, but is slow.

I think the issue is the same as discussed here:
http://www.planetz.com/forums/viewtopic ... orum=31&22

Basically, the phpbb 1.4 search code is poorly designed, and requires a huge amount of memory to run on large result datasets. Sometimes, the server doesn't have enough memory to run the search (depending on what else the server is doing at the time). Other times, it runs ok (albeit slowly).

Sorry for the inconvenience...

I'm considering ways to improve search performance, but it may not be possible without a database redesign.

Cheers,
-John

Post by **hubird** » Wed Mar 08, 2006 10:00 pm

thanks John for explaining, makes things more clear to me

phobic · Post by **phobic** » Thu Mar 09, 2006 3:13 am

ok, i'll keep trying. thanks for the advice. great site by the way.