XF 1.1 Search Improvements and UI Tweaks in XenForo 1.1

The search system for XenForo 1.1 has had some attention, and now includes the ability to include members in search results, adds profile posts to the search index and allows more control over where to search, including one constraint that has been (extremely) frequently requested ever since we first developed the search system.

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Hmmm ... I don't suppose you know if there's an add-on that can do this ATM?

I have a couple of off-topic forums that some people prefer to exclude from their results.
 
I'm working on an add-on to be able to let the users define the nodes
But, as usual=> no release that and no release guarantee
 
Is there any ETA on the Big Board Search AddOn?
We are planning to migrate our 1Mio. Big Board to XF, but need a comprehensive solution for our forums

Same here, or at the very least, I'd need to know if the Sphinx plugin is (or will be) updated to work on 1.1. That will be a major sticking point with upgrading the forum from vB3.x: without Sphinx, our server loads are killed, and we don't have the scratch to upgrade server hardware at any time soon.

Other than a Coventry system, that is the only real holdup for us now. Thread prefixes are here, an ignore system is here, and we can get the iTrader via an add-on.

Overall, it's really shaping up! My moderators on the big board are really anxious to see XF 1.1 in person now.
 
Same here, or at the very least, I'd need to know if the Sphinx plugin is (or will be) updated to work on 1.1. That will be a major sticking point with upgrading the forum from vB3.x: without Sphinx, our server loads are killed, and we don't have the scratch to upgrade server hardware at any time soon.

Other than a Coventry system, that is the only real holdup for us now. Thread prefixes are here, an ignore system is here, and we can get the iTrader via an add-on.

Overall, it's really shaping up! My moderators on the big board are really anxious to see XF 1.1 in person now.

To be fair the search system in XenForo operates in a different way. Whereas the post table was where the index was held and search queries ran against that has changed and there is a seperate table for which search queries run against, so if that table blocks due to locking users can still have a better experience when posting/viewing as the table holding those is not used for search queries.
 
The problem I see is that as busy as the forum is, a lot of people are clicking on the "View New Posts" button on our forum, so even if it were in a separate table, it would still be quite hammered by all the activity. That and the fact that there are over six million posts now. With Sphinx, at any rate, it gets around MySQL's inherent inefficiency and results consistently come in under 0.5 seconds, as opposed to as much as 45 seconds for some of the posts.

Newer MySQL apparently is adding fulltext searching to InnoDB table types, but even so, Sphinx has worked so well for us that I'm content to stick with it.
 
The problem I see is that as busy as the forum is, a lot of people are clicking on the "View New Posts" button on our forum, so even if it were in a separate table, it would still be quite hammered by all the activity. That and the fact that there are over six million posts now. With Sphinx, at any rate, it gets around MySQL's inherent inefficiency and results consistently come in under 0.5 seconds, as opposed to as much as 45 seconds for some of the posts.

Newer MySQL apparently is adding fulltext searching to InnoDB table types, but even so, Sphinx has worked so well for us that I'm content to stick with it.

I would do some benchmarking against the what's new page using AB or something to gauge the potential blocking issue. The only issue you should experience is that users "may" get slow search results but the rest of the board will be fine. Can I ask what is your concurrency count at the moment? (Bear in mind that you may have 1000 users online at one point but I guarantee you that a very small percentage of that would be doing concurrent searching)

As for FTS in InnoDB, indeed it is true, I posted a while ago the announcement that MySQL 5.6 will have backwards compatible support with MyISAM tables for FullText Searching which means no application changes. At the moment it is only available in a special download in the InnoDB labs trunk. The biggest issue with the Sphinx plugin is that it does not hook into all content types without additional changes to the config file. Now I know some details about the solution Kier has been working on (not going into them) and I suspect that he would have hooked it in such a way that new content types would automatically be available via the search addon. If I am wrong he will jump in here and correct me.
 
We had enough searches going on that it put a real drag on the server. Once Sphinx was in place, all of the congestion was lifted. Sphinx's indexing was also quite efficient--we rebuild once nightly, but I can now index once every two minutes and it only takes a second or two. But that was also vB3.7, which was not the most efficient either. The move to Sphinx was at least two years ago, so there is no way I could go back to benchmark the original configuration (pre-Sphinx) without killing the forum.

I really don't care which big board search I use, but I need to have either one in place before I attempt to move the board to XF. It'is one of those things where I need to install the forum and configure it with all of my "tricks" to speed it up, as it is something I won't have time to revisit in the future. Working with Sphinx was a crash course in learning more about the database and searches--I've had to do most of this myself with minimal help (other than forum posts to guide me). It's interesting lurking here to see what others come up with. I must say our big board runs loads anywhere between 2.00 and 4.00 during peak hours and it is still actually quite responsive, considering the load, but having XF in place will really make it feel much more snappy.
 
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