Smart Search can be exceptionally slow

[MarySutton]

Running Joomla 3.3.6

The Smart Search plugin on some of my sites is running exceptionally slow and there is no visual indicator that the search is running (because the site is launched in a window that hides the browser status bar for security reasons - I am passing the username/password in plain text and no, encryption is not a possibility) and does not have tabs, the default indicators in a browser - address field status or any indicators on tabs - are not available.

This is a site with a lot of content (numbers of articles). Is there a way to speed this up? If not, is there a search plugin available that would provide an indicator/status message? Or how can I request this as an enhancement to the Smart Search plugin?

I found a similar issue in the archives, but it does not look as though there were any responses.

Mary Sutton

[itoctopus]

On large websites, we use Sphinx instead of the Smart Search plugin. We completely disable smart search and modify the search to use Sphinx. The difference in search speed is truly amazing (milliseconds vs seconds).

Note that in order to use Sphinx you will need to have a dedicated server that can handle it properly (a VPS might work).