Database error. And then I have to wait 300 seconds.
Yeah, and if you, like me, have an attention span that’s been honed to a point by years of excessive FPS gaming and action films with millisecond cuts of various nondescript body parts randomly connecting in a painful manner, you’ll just end up with three open tabs displaying some message about having to wait 236 seconds and no clue what the hell you were searching for in the first place.
What is interesting is that TPTB have never (as far as I’m aware) actually answered this question. Does anyone with sufficient technical knowledge (or, even better, one of TPTB) know how difficult it would be to make the search engine fully functional. And why it’s never been done.
Now, I certainly do not know why this problem persists, but from what I’ve read in these parts lately, I’m willing to take an educated wild-assed guess:
This board exists only to make money. Thus, paying for things like sufficient equipment or tech support or whatever would be counterproductive.
The admin is incompetent.
This style of answer is ‘du jour’, but is this really the case? This is why I’d value a second opinion - with reference to the search engine problem only, he adds hastily. 
I have read that thread, but it doesn’t answer why most other boards don’t seem to have this problem. What I would like to know (in layman’s terms, preferably) is why this board is so different/problematical that a cure is impossible to come up with. Or do other boards have that memory/functionality conundrum?
This board isn’t different. There are much bigger boards, in fact, with far fewer problems. So there are two possibilities: The hardware sucks (possible, but I believe they’ve denied it), or the admin sucks.
This has been an extremely busy board for many years and the searchable database is huge. The suggestion has been made elsewhere that we offload older posts to an archive; I’m going to explore that with Jerry.
I’ve temporarily increased the amount of memory that a search process can use. This is as an experiment to see what impact such a change will have on the performance of the message boards. vBulletin places limits on how much memory any one process can consume in order to not unduly effect the whole. I’ve raised those limits and we’ll see what the net result is. If the additional resources allocated to search negatively effect reading and posting to the message boards then we’ll revert to the current situation as I look at other options.
Thanks, Jerry. Does the 300 second limit remain? Can that be reduced or removed?
It can be changed but not yet.
I already have two new changes to the functioning of the message board running concurrently as tests. If we start experiencing problems I can’t therefore start off by assuming it’s because of change 1 since it might be change 2 or could even possibly be situations 3+. I don’t want to add a third change into the mix right now before I understand how the first two changes are going to work out.
While I know the search limitations rankle I have to weigh off the resources that search can consume versus the resources necessary to read and post to the message boards. It’s a question of who can do what to effect whom and how I configure things to allow those resource conflicts to arise. Do I favor searchers or readers/posters? Unfortunately reducing the time limit between searches has the net effect of increasing the total amount of searches performed. That has downsides for readers/posters in our current configuration.
Well, yeah, I was being a bit snarky, but I can offer up one datum: viz., Jerry hasn’t updated his Update Thread OP since December 30, which strongly suggests that he has been busy with other things. Also, that fact that he if paying the board a house call on a Sunday morning suggest a “resource allocation problem” that has absolutely nothing to do with the hamsters in the server room. But someone else will have to address the reason for that problem.
Can you change it such that one doesn’t have to wait 300 seconds after a search that has zero results? It was that way on the previous hardware.
The minimum time between searches is a single parameter setting that applies to all searches no matter what their end result is. So no it can’t be set to allow a new search quicker if the previous search returned zero results.
If search functions differently now than it did in the past it’s most likely because the version of vBulletin has been upgraded and the developer modified how search works in the newer version. We’ve not configured search to work any differently than how it was configured on previous versions.
It must have been changed due to the new version of vBulletin then. Thanks for looking into it.