As pointed out here, the search engine module in 5.5 has massive problems, mostly on indexing - even with smaller sites.

This issue is well known and has been worked on for 6.x-dev. A first version of a backport has been made available already by douggreen. However, the current official statement is "no official backport".

I kindly ask the developers to reconsider officially backporting the recent search engine improvements to 5.x.
I think it is definetely worth it to make an official backport, since

  • lots of people are affected and
  • 5.x is still within life cycle for a long time and
  • upgrading to 6.x is no option for most production sites yet.
  • the amount of works seems low, since most of it seems to be done already

Therefore, having no backport means a dead end for some of us.

Actually, the latest patch works for my 5.5 installations already - I haven't tested thoroughly yet, but will. I don't know how "current" the patch really is, however, it solved my unusably slow indexing problem.

I am happy to help in testing, of course.

Thanks!
Stephan

Comments

douggreen’s picture

douggreen commented

For 5.x, I recommend using the views_fastsearch 5.x-2.x version. It's the module that spawned all the ideas that ended up in 6.x. It's not quite as good as the 6.x core version in regards to the terms (A B OR C, etc) it supports, but I use this on many live sites, with equally fast results. Because VFS exists, I don't see the need for a backport.

Anonymous’s picture

Anonymous (not verified) commented

Ok, I didn't know of these efforts and will test it right away.

Thanks a lot,
Stephan

Anonymous’s picture

Anonymous (not verified) commented
Status: Active » Closed (won't fix)

This looks really good. After installation of VFS, my index now builds in a reasonable amount of time. Thanks a lot!

One remaining question: It looks like I don't necessarily need to use your module for search queries but could also continue to use the built-in search, given that my performance issues were soly related to building the index. Of course, I would not benefit from the speed-ups of queries. Is that assumption correct?

BTW: Is there a plan or an easy way to enable searching for parts of words (VFS or built-in 6.x)?

Thanks a lot,
Stephan

junyor’s picture

junyor commented

@rickauer: You may want to look at the Porter Stemmer module for partial word matching.

As If’s picture

As If commented

@rickauer - I agree with everything you said in the initial post, including the justifications for posting this (5.X) issue at all. Many of us (and our clients) are married to 5.X for the coming duration, and yet our search indexes are stuck. The show-stopping problems in 5.X are about indexing not about searching and not about view-building. I vote to drag this topic back to your original point.

Rhino’s picture

Rhino commented

I second that vote, I've been having massive problems with search indexing killing my site that is on a dedicated server. Endlessly running sql threads eventually kill the server and this needs to be fixed.

douggreen’s picture

douggreen commented

I've posted a patch for this on 146466.