Big Board Owners - Do You Use FullText Search?

[Lexserv]

I'm wondering what the majority of Big Board owners use, the vB Search or FullText Search?

If you don't use FullText Search, why not?

[Andreas]

Yes we do, vB search is unusable for medium+ sized boards.

[Lynne]

You might want to define what you consider 'big board' (it used to be that was a forum with over 500,000 posts, but I'm not sure if that is still the common definition).

We have a bit over one million posts and still use vbulletin's search and we've had no problems at all (knock on wood). As for why we use it, I have just never bothered to switch.

[Floris]

I am not a big-boards owner (just yet on one of my sites). But I do have fulltext search turned on. On all my forums.

[unp]

fulltext was killing my forums (700,000 posts - VPS 2Gb Ram) Table locking was spiking the load. Things are lot better ever since I switch back to default VB search.

[Anthony89]

fulltext was killing my forums (7K posts - VPS 2Gb Ram) Table locking was spiking the load. Things are lot better ever since I switch back to default VB search.

With only 7,000 posts? =S

[unp]

With only 7,000 posts? =S

700,000 actually, guess bit too much wine the other day

[Lexserv]

Will my database shrink in size if I switch from vB Search to FullText?

I have 3 big boards (1mil+, 1mil+, 500k+) running on a single dedicated server and the disk space in /var is about to get full.

[Colin F]

The data in the database itself will shrink, but the database will create indexes internally which'll be similar to what vBulletin did before with the post and word tables, so there won't really be any space savings.

Moving to fulltext searching isn't a solution to not having enough disk space.

[Lenni]

This poll is missing "I don't know".

[Martz]

Sphinx is great at indexing.. for some it's not a perfect solution but I've indexed a dataset of 20 million rows and the search speed is incredible, > 0.1ms for any search term (min 1 character).

According to their site they can support very very big text datasets, like 100gb+

Zend lucene is also supposed to be very good, done purely in PHP but I haven't tried that yet.

[adnoid]

We've got 3,000,000 posts and use fulltext search - but we've got to find a better solution. We have noticeable hangs a couple times a week, always a fulltext search that goes to disk temp files for sorting and can run 1,800 seconds or more. The posters give up and rerun the same search over and over when results don't come back in a few seconds...

[Andreas]

@Lexserv
Fulltext indexes are usually smaller then vBs own indexes, but as Colin already said - that's not a solution to reduce disk usage.

[Lexserv]

Got it. Thanks, guys.