There have been topics on this and I understand that the wait 120 seconds to do another search has some validity to keep resources from being overloaded. However, it isn’t clear if that is still a valid concern.
If the goal is to restrict some sort of automated attack/abuse, could a lower limit be effective.
Perhaps it is just my carelessness but having a search fail to find something and having to wait to submit the adjusted criteria can be annoying.
Have the administrators considered setting it to 15 seconds for a test period?
We still have occasional issues with board performance, which pretty conclusively proves that it is still a valid concern. I wouldn’t expect them to adjust that timer any time soon.
The search engine here is also known to be a bit wonky. If the timer bothers you, there’s always google.
Searches are fairly resource intensive. Allowing people to search more quickly or hit the new posts button repeatedly would definitely strain the hamsters. Why would you think that it wouldn’t cause problems?
There are some searches the Board can do that Google cannot.
When a Search fails due to a server error, we are still subjected to the 120-second rule. I probably average about two SDMB searches per day, but the second search results from an error (whether mine or servers) in the first attempt, and I need to wait 120 seconds for it.
It would be far better to allow the 2nd search but impose a 240-second delay on a 3rd search. The programmer might need an extra minute for this complexer rule, but that minute would have been repayed 1000’s of times by now.
Recall that they’re not going to engage a programmer to make code changes.
If the desired feature is already a built-in setting in their version of vBulletin they’ll be potentially willing to twiddle that built-in knob.
If the desired feature isn’t already a built-in feature, then it’s as immutable as sunrise. Policy trumps technology every time; as is true in every organization.
I, personally still don’t buy that the 120 restriction is due to server issues now. I understand that it was at one point, but IIRC that was put in place like 10 years ago AND IIRC we’ve since upgraded the servers. Couldn’t we at least try turning that off. Yes, I know there’s google search, but that’s not as good, or at least can’t be used in the same capacity.
We change almost nothing around here, I wish we (well not we, TPTB) would just come out and say they’re leaving it not because they’re worried about problems but because they don’t want to change it.
Like I said, why can’t we just try it. Turn it off of for a week or so. If we set the servers on fire, we’ll turn it back on, but instead of just automatically saying no (because that’s the boilerplate answer to any question about changing something), we used to have it that way and it didn’t work, ten years ago, we’ll actually have some fresh data.
Besides, as always comes up in these types of threads, this is the only board I know of that has this kind of restriction (and you have paying members on top of that, which is rare (and ads also)).
I have no control over the timer one way or another, but considering that the most recent complaints about board performance were only a few months ago, you’re going to have a really hard time convincing me that we don’t have server issues.
What we don’t have is the server logs. They might be crashing 25% of searches now during peak hours. If so, it’d be silly to reduce the setting and make it 50% during peak hours.
The real usability problem for most of us is that we’re not searching during peak hours, but the one setting has to be good enough to protect the operation 24/7/365.
I know you can’t make any changes, but can you at least admit that ‘complaints about board performance’ doesn’t automatically mean that using the built in search feature is causing those problems? OTOH, if you have logs or data that show that it was crashing due to search issues, that’s different, but I’m working on the assumption that you don’t.
Still, seems like an easy test. Turn off the timer and see what happens. If the board is never stable, great, we’ve done an experiment instead of spending 10 years just assuming it won’t work.
You could even go the other way. Turn off the search feature…do you really think we would go a year without board performance issues? You seem to be suggesting that performance problems every few months are related to searches, therefore, if we don’t allow searching, we’ll have no problems right?
Or, as has been suggested a ton of times, lower the timer. 20 seconds, 30 seconds, even a minute. It really sucks when you double click ‘New Posts’ or do a search and get no results and have to sit there for two minutes until you can to it again.
Seems like a self proclaimed engineer computer geek would be willing to say ‘yeah, maybe it’s not an awful idea to try it the other way’ instead of jumping into everyone of these threads to show us how deep he can dig his heels in on the subject.
I don’t believe the argument is that the search is causing the problems. Frequent searches in the context of a somewhat problematic server exacerbate the problems.
I don’t have access to the server logs, but I don’t think that the search engine is causing all of the problems. It’s more of an overall loading problem caused by users, search engine spiders, spammers, hackers, and who knows what else. Searches and new post button clicks add into the overall load.
If you have a car driving down the road and it slows down every time it tries to climb a hill, you may not know exactly what weight in the car is pushing it over its limits of what it can handle. Maybe your passengers are too heavy. Maybe there’s too much weight in the trunk. It’s pretty obvious that allowing the passengers to throw twice as many bags into the trunk is only going to make the problem worse. If you are trying to keep the car running at full speed, it’s not smart to add more weight until you get the car into a state where it’s not slowing down every time it goes up a hill.
Same thing here. The fact that we continue to have performance problems means that there’s not a whole lot of spare capacity on the server side of things, and at times there isn’t enough capacity to handle the load we have. Even though I don’t know exactly where the server load is, it’s pretty obvious to me that adding more server accesses is only going to make things worse. It seems really silly to me to talk about increasing the server load when we already have server side issues.
But like I said, this is just my 2 cents on the subject. I don’t have access to the timer one way or the other.
Further, while we have many different kinds of server load, one would expect that the relative proportions of each remain roughly constant with time. If, ten years ago, one-minute searches made up a significant fraction of server load, then the best guess is that they’d be a significant fraction now, too. And so if the total load is just a little bit under what the servers can handle (as evidenced by the occasional slowdowns we still have), then increasing the search load would be just as bad now as it was then.
I don’t think you have server issues in terms of hardware. I think you guys need a competent database administrator to run some analysis on your structure and recommend (possibly) some index changes that will improve search efficiency.
But if 10 years ago your car was stalling multiple times a day (remember when you’d spawn a new tab/window for all the threads you wanted read and hope for the best) and now you’ve got a new car that blips once every few months, wouldn’t it be worth at least trying to put a little more strain on it?
Sure, maybe it’ll crash and burn in the first two hours…OTOH, maybe it’ll be just fine and continue to blip once every few months as it does now. However, you seem totally unwilling to even so much as hypothetically think about it.
That is the problem. A solution implemented ten years ago is being maintained because of occasional symptoms of unknown origin. Maybe the problem is people going out to google and having a third party search hit your server?
Engineer_comp_geek can’t look at the logs or adjust the settings. Can anyone? The wait is set for 120 which implies that it is a configurable item. If it were to require actual coding I would agree that it is probably not worth it.
The logic used to not even consider a test, could be extended. If we don’t let anyone post or read, the servers probably wouldn’t have as many issues.
I’d be glad to do it for free. It would require giving me remote access at admin level. I am assuming this board runs on SQL Server. If it runs on MySQL or something similar, I can pick that up quite easily.