whats the deal with the 30 seconds between searches.... its really irritating

 

spend that 30 seconds thinking about how to submit a better search

 

normally it's not 30 secs that you have to wait, but more like 5-10 secs

 

But in seriousness, why is it setup that way? Would too many searches slow down the website? Would this site be sped up if people would regularly purge all their sent and received PMs?

 

i just think them mods dont know how to change it

 

I'm the first to admit that I don't know **** about this stuff, but I'll take a stab at it.
I believe there are robot-type programs (bots?) that can attack and crash sites
by searching like crazy. So, the 30 second rule stops that.

Help a brother out here Brains.

 

Maybe something to do with your internet connection? I have cable internet and the search button works for me instantly never had any problems. And I use it A LOT!

 

its something like that I believe.

 

well ill be the first to say

its time to hunt down every last one of these damn robots and kill the lot of em

viva la resistance!

 

If it was bots we should lower it to 10 seconds

 

So people don't pound on the database search. If enough people did it fast enough, it could cause the board to slow down or in worst case crash.

 

Yes.

That's why they turned off search for people who aren't registered / logged in, about six months ago.

Along with a number of other features that were disabled/limited around then, it's done as a temporary workaround until whenever things really get fixed.

 

Its hard to really relate the complexities of running a site this large to some folks, until they're actually the ones doing the work. A lot of the things that seem pretty simple, end up being the biggest headaches. Search is one of those things that seems trivial, but ends up being huge.

Think of it this way -- you are a file clerk at a company with 60,000 employees, and over 4 million documents in a filing center. Throughout the course of your work day, most of these employees request documents from you one at a time, and request them by a unique ID number. You find the document and hand it to them. Now, you're also tasked with finding documents for folks by what's written on them. Joe from Accounting says "I need all documents that talk about 'big blue widgets'." So, you go off to look through the documents. In the mean time, all the regular employees are still asking you for documents. Now Mary from Purchasing wants all the documents written by Fred in Logistics, and then Buford from Sanitation wants every document about trash cans. All the while, you're still expected to get everyone their documents by number.

This is exactly what we're up against with search. Finding things by number (ie. post id or thread id, the number displayed in the address bar) is very fast and easy. Finding things by the words INSIDE that document is not -- the system has to read through the documents (rather, indexes of the documents) to find what you want, make a list of ID numbers, and then return the results. All the while, its still handing out regular documents.

Some folks have even said "well Google does it, why can't you?" We have 4 servers now. Google has, at the last estimate over 2 years ago, well over 100,000 servers. Its a simple matter of scale.

 

Google is also a company (publicly traded no less), not an enthusiast board. I'd believe that their budget is slightly larger than the boards.

You can use Google to search this board. I've done it before.

Put "STS turbo" site:ls1tech.com into Google, it searches THEIR database. It's fast and it doesn't hurt the board. Granted it will not give you the newest stuff, but if you are searching for many instances of a given topic it works well.

 

So what about people regularly clearing out PMs?

 

The PM limit is set where it is because at that level it has very minimal (if any) effect on things.

Search is the major problem.

PMs aren't searched.

So no. Don't worry about it.

 

Nice explanation