Optimize the search?

[Joe]

Search is killing my server. I have ~3MM posts, and 1500+ users online thruout the day. If i have search disabled, server load is under 1.0 on the front end server. With search on, load avg's 2.5 - 4.0 and the whole site slows down.

Is there any way to optimize the search? Would fulltext search move the load from my front end server to the database server?

[Steve Machol]

I would defnitely try the fulltext search to see if this makes a difference.