September 8, 2012 - 06:52
Hi,
As I am sure you are aware, the site has been had a problem with the large database causing intermittent lag for some time now. This was caused by Drupal's in-built search indexer not being designed for large forums. I've now implemented a different search engine (Apache Solr http://lucene.apache.org/solr/), which will take a lot of the work off the database. It'll take a few days to reindex everything, but we should start seeing a speed improvement straight away (although the search will give some incomplete results until it rebuilds the index). I'll be keeping a close eye on things over the weekend.
The revamped search has a couple of nice extra features, including auto-complete (type half a word in to the search box to see) and "Did you mean?" on the results page, based on common words used on the site.
Cheers,
Martin