Or at least don’t make it count towards the full 120 seconds (forever).
Can it be reduced to something more palatable like 20 seconds?
It counts as a search because it is a search.
The New Posts feature may not seem like a search to you, but the way it is implemented in the software it is a search, and it does contribute significantly to the server load, just like any other search does.
I don’t have access to admin functions, but I don’t think it’s possible to change the New Posts timeout independent of the main search timeout. Even if it is possible, it’s probably not a good idea to do so since the whole function of that timeout is to help keep the server load down to a manageable level.
There have been numerous discussions about lowering the overall search timeout, and it may get done at some point. If it were up to me, I would try it and just see what happens, but it’s not up to me. We also need to wait until we’re certain we have a stable system before we try things like this. They’ve recently made a lot of changes behind the scenes for the mobile skin and some other things, and we don’t have a whole lot of run time on our current configuration. If we change it and start having issues, we won’t know if those issues are because we changed it or if they are related to previous changes. Once we have a bit more runtime on everything, I’ll bring it up with the admins and we’ll see what happens.
I won’t pretend to know how the “new post” search algorithm works. But using some common sense, (yuk, yuk) one would think the search itself would be extremely simple. just grab the last 45 or so posts (using the universal time stamp from each post) and associate those posts with the forums they’re in. Done. The searches that require keywords I can see as being extremely resource consuming because you have to find ALL occurrences of those words in the vast data base. Doing a search for “The Cooler of Death” in my opinion, would require more resources than merely grabbing the last 45 posts.
Interesting, Thanks.