We are certainly aware of this. Here's the update. I have no plans to charge for search despite what seems to be a trend for other big boards. Our challenge is that most other cords can limit search to longer words such as 5 or more letters and it's no big deal. Because of the nature of airport codes, etc. we have to go to three letter word search and you can guess what that is like in nearly 4 million posts.
The security fix of PHP did not help the function of search as we had high hopes for. Traffic in the first quarter of 2005 is up significantly which has somewhat made a breaking point for search.
Our plan which is currently in process. We have purchased a new server just to handle search. This was, with redundancy, while search may crawl, it won't effect the performance of the Board itself. We are right now re-indexing all 4 million threads in a test off line. This looks like it is going to take 3-5 days. Once we find out if we have some corrupted indexes, we will fix them and then launch the search server - without paid search being part of the equation. In addition, another load balancer is being considered to help since we have also decided to add another server as a graphic server to hold the smilies and static design pages of FT. This should help reduce even more any stress on the existing three servers that currently serve FT.
And as our monthly bandwidth requirements have mushroomed from 4Mbps to nearly 6Mbps in recent months (in addition to the burstable to 10 Mbps) it's a constant struggle to keep up. We very much appreciate the comments from our members who are more technical up to date on these types of things (attorney28, ScottC, Axey, etc.) and hope that this news is greeted with some relief and if you'll grant us the next few weeks to perfect these changes i think we'll all be happy in the end.
Originally Posted by Axey
There's no real easy fix without a lot of cash being thrown around. Growing pains..