Linux Questions . Org Search mechanism
 

Dear All,

I am trying to use the search function that is part of Linuxquestions.org. Any query hangs indefinitely. Is this an ongoing issue? I know it has nothing to do with my connection because I ran a connectivity test at the same time.

Best,

Testuser021845

What terms are you using for the search?

Not indefinitely.
But it gets unresponsive sometimes - usually possible to wait it out.

PS:
you should limit your search to 6 months or 1 year ago. If you use "Anytime", it WILL take a while. LQ is HUGE.

If you have a look at this forum, you'll see threads about this same issue. From other threads, yes it's ongoing issue, and according to Jeremy, they're looking at fixing that. I think the issue in this case and generally is that, if you search and there's only one string/word in your search term, that can cause the issue that you describe. Because it's not specific enough to any particular subject/thread. For example, if you search for just the word "linux", then there's probably thousands of threads here that contain that word/string - so it may well just timeout instead of displaying all of those threads (because there would be so many of them in that example). I've seen the same issue here too.

The search has been literally useless for the last half a year. I use Google to search this forum now.

Jeremy's response to this, for the last half decade, was that he was at work on a Sphinx-based search backend. I think it might be time to roll that out.

Most of it depends on search terms, I've used it in the past couple of weeks and I had to keep adjusting the seach words to get the results I was looking for, and some of the more generic terms I used resulted in what you observed

For these reasons I don't employ advanced search much, I feel there are usually other ways to get around needing to use it.

I nearly always get a timeout my first attempt, then a retry may work. Retries usually emit results very fast by the way.

Sometimes my search spec would've resulted in a very large amount of hits which might barely ever work.

If you change your search choices, you typically end up again with that first timeout experience.

The spare times I do an advanced search, I kick it off, swap tabs or windows and then come back to it at some later point, and it may have results, or it may have timed out.

No idea how much time is too much to have let it timed out and then resubmit where the "switch" is once again reset. I.e. you search, it times out, you ignore it for an hour, or some length time. Performing a retry at that point usually means you're back at the square one rule.

The problem is (obviously) that the search backend does an SQL query that's so inefficient that it cannot complete.

Since the most recent infrastructure upgrade, the search results should return a bit quicker (although worst-case queries may still time out). While the search update has been delayed due to code update delays, it's something we're now actively working on.

--jeremy

Not knowing when that recent upgrade was, however sometime in the last week I did a very common search I typically perform.

Search for posts by a particular user, in the last week. Basically go to the advanced search option and type in a username, select the exact name once the auto-complete pulldown shows it to you.

These are the types of searches I perform which time out. I don't change any of the other options.

The typical purpose for this search would be on myself, where I know that I responded to a very similar thread, or gave advice about something very similar, and I wish to recall that recent posts. Usually I have some self information to let me know it was within the last week, otherwise I may search as far back as a month. Similarly I may recall another user who answered something where I feel a reference to their answer may be useful, same thing I'd search the last week, or last month based on their username.

And the most common reason for doing so, is because the two easiest ways to recall recent posts from a certain user are (1) what I'm describing here, or (2) finding a post by that user and then clicking on the link that is their name and using that menu to view their recent posts.

Murphy's Law states that if I decide to look up a thread where user A had posted, just so I can see their name as a link proves out that I'll never see the wanted name that way, so instead I use Advanced Search.

Was going to say that I've just searched 2-3 times and received 504 for all of them. Re-loaded LQ, and it says LQ is offline. I'm wondering what will happen to this draft. I'll copy so I can paste it, if needed.

Searches for a particular user posts is what I usually do in advance

I seldom used the LQ search, but I've found the search to be on the slow side for quite some time and attribute it primarily to the ever-increasing size of the LQ database.

But, in testing a bit in response to OP first post, I did encounter an oddity. I searched for "k3b" and "K3B" and search responded almost immediately with "nothing found" (or words to that effect). I know that there have been a number of posts referring the k3b over the years. (In case you aren't familiar with it, k3b is the KDE optical disk burning software.)

Searching for other terms ("burning" "plasma") returned results reasonably quickly (less that ten seconds, to my surprise--a result of the improvements Jeremy mentioned above, no doubt).