Search Restrictions for Full Members
 

I'm all for the need to search for threads before making a post, but sometimes that can be a pain in the ass if you make a search, don't find what you need, and try to make another one but end up having to wait 40 seconds.

Anywho, my suggestion is to remove the 40 second restriction for full members.

I'm assuming it's there to keep people from constantly searching to kill the bandwidth of the site, and if that's true, it seems like those who are proven to be good members could be trusted to not sit there and try to screw up the forum.

There needs to be a minimum time between, but 40 sec is a bit long. It is not to help with bandwidth, its CPU load, if you get an ass hat who spam’s hard queries, it can bring the entire site to a crawl.

Yes, searches use massive amounts of CPU time and having too many going at once can bring the site to a crawl. And by too many, I mean a few ;) The 40 seconds serves to spread out searches so that it's less likely that too many will be going at once.

Ah, alright. That's fair.

Individual searches have been observed to cause processor loads approaching 100%. Allowing rapid-fire searches could cause problems.

Processor loads of 100%.... Don't get me started.

If I run any program, by itself, on the fastest computer in the world. And there are no other bottlenecks - it will hit 100% CPU.

CPU's are supposed to run at 100%. If they aren't, you've got a bottleneck somewhere else - somewhere much slower, probably in the memory, network interface or disk I/O. Or else (fairly commonly) your machine simply doesn't do much.

I have no definite opinion on searches though.

An appropriately written program will never use 100% of a CPU. CPUs are NOT meant to run at 100%, and failing to do so is not a failing of hardware but an intelligent program. Unless you intend to run ONE program on the computer (you know, before the days of things like multitasking) then this might be true. But here in the 21st century, we have servers running tens or hundreds of different services that need to be using equal shares of the CPU time; 100% collectively, perhaps, but not individually.

This is ESPECIALLY true of a webserver: do you really want ONE client to bog down the server so much that it is inaccessible to other clients?

i have a suggestion to remove the search time. use google's site search. :) i posted it in a thread where ppl couldnt find the original one.

all you need to do is type: "search word site:www.url.com"
so if i'm looking for sunsets on tfp, then i'd type "sunset site:www.tfproject.org"
there's no 40sec wait. it works. and it's clean. give it a shot!

and i know there's a way to implement a box for a google search on this website. i've seen it before. :)

If you are at all familiar with Unix server loads, you would not be saying anything of the sort.

Yeah, I didn't know about the google search for websites until just recently (after I'd posted this) so I'll make use of that.

Now this is really cool. I had no idea you could search thins way. It's a new thing to me and I plan to log off and try it out nright now!

See ya!!