The search function in my forum has not been working well for ages

[RedPanda2013]

Hi, I can't remember what a friend of mine disabled or edited years ago attempting to make the forum load faster and now that I changed server I would like to fix that issue too.

Nearly every time I try searching something I get this error (translated in English):

There was an error!
Because of the excessive load on the server, the search function has been automatically and temporarily disabled. Please try again later.

What can I do? Thank you

[d3vcho]

Hello!

Is Load Balacing enabled in your forum? Admin > Configuration > Server Settings > Load Balacing

If so, please, try disabling it and tell us if the error is gone.

Regards

[RedPanda2013]

Hola! I am Italian...is this what you are referring to?

[d3vcho]

Ciao! Yes, that is. Just disable it and tell us what happens.

Regards

[Sir Osis of Liver]

Admin -> Search -> Search Method

A search index can greatly improve the performance of searches on your forum. Especially when the number of messages on a forum grows bigger, searching without an index can take a long time and increase the pressure on your database. If your forum is bigger than 50.000 messages, you might want to consider creating a search index to assure peak performance of your forum.

Note that a search index can take up quite some space. A fulltext index is a built-in index of MySQL. It's relatively compact (approximately the same size as the message table), but a lot of words aren't indexed and it can, in some search queries, turn out to be very slow. The custom index is often bigger (depending on your configuration it can be up to 3 times the size of the messages table) but it's performance is better than fulltext and relatively stable.

[RedPanda2013]

well...certainly my forum has more than 50,000 messages.

just myself wrote nearly 30,000 posts in 5 years so far.

Unfortunately I can't see that path:

Admin -> Search -> I get error...so I guess I need to try what "d3vcho" suggested me to do.

Should I also edit those values?

Thank you guys!

[d3vcho]

Maybe you can increase the value for "Threshold to disabling search", if you want to keep enabled Load Balancing.

Also, what error do you get when you enter in "Search"?

Regards

[RedPanda2013]

Also, what error do you get when you enter in "Search"?

Regards

same as above

[Kindred]

you definitely need to add a search index