[TYPO3] search for large sites

[Dave Chewter]

Hi All

Just wondering how many people here find problems with indexed search on 
large sites. It's a subject that comes up again and again on the lists but 
never seems to get a huge amount of response, which is probably to be 
expected as many people don't reach the limits of what indexed search can 
do.

Our site has ~27,000 pages of content which correlates to a index_rel table 
with over 2 million rows of data. The search slows to a crawl (somewhere 
between 10 and 30 seconds to get a search result) and pushes server load up 
considerably when multiple searches are being performed.

What has everyone done who has a large site, have you tried optimising 
indexed search, or have you just given up and looked for an external 
solution? Would be interested to hear everyone's thoughts. Also would anyone 
be interested in sharing the cost of having a scalable search extension 
developed?

Thanks
Dave