Hey,
thanks for reaching out! Try unticking some options in the plugin settings and see if that helps. And do you by any chance have a really big database? Unfortunately that could be the issue.
Looking forward to your reply, take care and have a very lovely day,
Petra
I have only this ticked: http://cl.ly/image/0m292v0S2t2J
But the database is big that is true but it was working fine up until a specific point and since then it takes 10 – 15 seconds to return the results.
And when I check the web and the forum I see this seems to be a common problem after a while.
There must be something we can do to speed it up.
Because the results that it returns are fine – it just takes forever to return the results.
Thanks
Sammy83
Hey,
thanks for getting back to us and for the screenshot! The thing is that our plugin hooks on default WP search and we only extend that search. As WordPress itself has some scalability issues – with every option you select in our plugin settings, makes the original query more complex and hence needs more time to execute. If you disable our plugin, search is much faster as the SQL query behind it is simpler. It makes the whole thing even slower if you have a lot of visitors on your site.
We really do appreciate your feedback but we can’t make any promises when we will address this issue as our development plans are already packed as it is at the moment. But we do suggest to use SQL query profiler or something similar to figure out which query or which part of the query is the slowest:
1. http://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/1162/how-well-does-wordpress-scale
2. https://managewp.com/plugin-performance-profiler
3. http://www.slideshare.net/josephscott/wordpress-performance-scalability-presentation
All the best,
Petra
Having the same problem with a big WooCommerce shop – 4000 products and 300,000 postmeta records linking to those products.
The problem seems to be that this plugin joins all these products to EVERY postmeta record and does a wildcard text search through all those postmeta fields – every single one of them. That is why the database query is so slow. It needs to limit which postmeta post_key are searched and not just blindly look through them all. For my install, this means it is doing a non-indexed wildcard string match on 300,000+ database rows, which takes a good 14 seconds on a very fast server running flat-out.
Strangely, unchecking the “search custom fields” box in the plugin admin page makes no difference – a search still joins to every wp_postmeta record by post_id and then looks for ‘%keyword%’ in the meta_value for each of them.
Unchecking “Search every custom field” finally worked. The options must have been cached, because it wasn’t making a difference at first, but eventually unchecking that box prevents the search looking at metadata fields and takes a 13+ second query down to a handful of milliseconds.
Now, ideally, this should not be an all-or-nothing option. If the plugin allowed you to choose which metadata fields are searched in, then it could be an awful lot faster and more useful.
I would like to have this new feature too
