[admin (no pm's please)]

As of tonight larger forums will be gradually converted to use a different search system. There should be very little functional difference, but it will have a big benefit. It will  be left to the database to deal with search indexing via the mysql full text indexing system. The result is smaller databases and much faster posting/editing times. Previously each posting had to be picked apart and indexed word by word, a very slow process on large forums.

If you are running a large forum, you should be converted in the next month or so. If you are currently seeing slow posting times, then you will KNOW when it has happened

[admin (no pm's please)]

The support forum finally made the cut on this one And searching still looks ok to me.

I may start extending and accelerating this process.

[admin (no pm's please)]

Some poor behaviour on searching for ALL terms has been seen with this system.

I have code in place to improve this on downsizer and will soon extend to all forums.

[admin (no pm's please)]

Now installed.

I still think there is a way to go here.

[Myles]

Not sure if this is directly related to this topic, but google seems to be downloading my forum pages faster than before.

[admin (no pm's please)]

Great

Is that a google analytics graph?

You should notice a lot of threads in the blog forum here on our efforts to speed things up.

The search thing would not have effected the graph so it must be one of the other efforts.

[Myles]

Yeah it's a google graph, from webmaster tools.

It's great that the pages download quicker for users, but also because page download speed is generally regarded as one of the variables in the google search engine algorithim, a less important variable than the url or title obviously, but everything helps.

[admin (no pm's please)]

Of course for speed graphic size should be minimal!

14112 bytes compared to your logo at 52976 bytes.

[Myles]

Thanks a million!

I thought when i tried the jpg format before that it reduced the quality, when i used the Microsoft Paint application. Graphics wouldn't be my forte, i have tried learning more on Gimp recently since i can't get by being ignorant about it my whole life!

Much appreciated, i've switched my banner to your jpg version now.

[admin (no pm's please)]

jpg does reduce quality, but that was simply the default quality saved via the GIMP program. I was expecting to have to tweak, but the default seemed to score well on size and quality.

[admin (no pm's please)]

Tweaked this again to make searching for all terms work a bit better.