Why so many problems with the search function?
 

What is it about the search feature that makes it so hard to keep up and running? It seems as though it has been down or working intermittently for the last year or more, just curious why when the rest of the site has been working so well (speed, availability, etc) the search is still having so many problems.

Shawn

i secound that motion...

huge fucking database + db app not designed to handle that + lots of queries/writes per second = not so much on the search.

there are efforts in the works to try to alleviate some of the problems we're experiencing, however it requires a serious amount of effort on Brains, our site technical admin/guru, and this is just a part-time gig for him. There is only so much one can do on their free time.

Now, if 10k members donated $10 a year or so for some extra privileges like more PM space and maybe a cool username color and maybe access to a special lounge, then maybe we could bring Brains on full time and this site would fly like a bat out of hell :)

If we donate $10 do we get free parts? I donate regularly by supporting the sponsors. There are plenty of sponsors. Should be plenty of money. This is how it works... As a matter of fact, I received about $2k worth of parts from sponsors on here today.

Obviously, there is plent of knowledge to go around here... Fix the search!!!

:)

Don't worry folks, big things are in the works ;)

It is a software limitation. Most large sites prune threads older than a couple months. We have always felt it was important to preserve ALL of our posts since the site was started in 2001. Would you prefer we delete threads older than 3-4 months?

We are working on new software resolutions, but there is not an off-the-shelf solution we can buy right now. It has to be a custom made software to fit our needs.

Search will be back up tonight when the number of people drops down, or I get too tired and I take the site down anyway. I need to re-replicate the database back over to the dedicated search database server, after it fell out of sync earlier this week. That means taking a locked snapshot of the ENTIRE database, during which time the site will be completely locked up / unavailable. Once the copy is made, it needs to be pushed over the wire to the search database server, and then resync'ed to the master. Pretty easy, just time consuming due to the volume of data.

Hear, Hear! :judge:

What the hell did he just say?!!!!!! LOL. I think my head is gonna explode after reading that.

:emb: That was the dumbed down version too ...

:jest:

Thanks for making me feel better lol

lol.. did you enjoy the flash game I posted while I took the site down?

Only took like what, 30 minutes? Search is just about to be turned on (give me 10 more minutes)

He made a back up.

more or less, yes! That's it :D

nifty
it popped as a trojan with the settings and since I couldn't source it....

Did you find the same thing I did on the source? Some people have got to get Vista locked up before allowing employees on them :judge:

So, what's the status now?

Thanks for your hard work and time.

Wow, Cyphur, didn't think of it that way...

$10 a year for 64,000 registered members, take the membership loss to those that won't "pay" for it to 50,000 members, that's $500,000 that would leave for just site maintenance.....Brains, could you live on say, a 1/4 of that full time??? I know I could!

Don't forget about the paying advertisers. Think about it, right now there's 139 advertisers. I remember seeing Tony say the rates were $175 a month. So that's $24,325.00 a month or $291,900.00 a year. Obviously they are paying thousands a month just to host the site but the money it brings in is huge.