Re: cvs: phpweb / search.php

Hi Wez!

What we have in place currently (with google) is an "emergency fix" to reduce the load from a crippling 230+ down to a more managable level; it means we can use *all* the mirrors regardless of their local search capabilities, and still be reasonably sure that the user will end up with a useful page.

Mirror searching worked since a long time now on all mirrors, utilizing ch.php.net [currently] for remote searches if the mirror cannot handle the search. The maintainer of ch.php.net agreed to make his mirror the default search provider. So the only thing you would need to do was to disable the search feature [remove the two httpd.conf settings] from the php.net vhost setup, and voila, there won't be any more searches on php.net, while a much better index would be used then google.

The real problem is that phpweb itself is terribly inefficient (eg: manual lookups and the shortcut features typically result in 3 redirects, the phpdoc manual pages do too much on each page load etc.); we don't have enough CPU to meet the demands of the visitors to our site. So, by all means, add the favourite search engine via my.php.net, (Philip also suggested a favourite mirror cookie too); but lets try and keep it light, and lets try also to reduce the number of redirects and magic URLs :)

This was a complementary feature for you emergency fix. But as you acknowledged that it was an emergency fix, and I think that it was not the right emergency fix, I am not going to develop any advances for this particular search method.

As for search.php.net; we probably don't have quite enough CPU to host it on our current box, so we need another box for that.

As said, and as you can see in the code, we have ch.php.net as a semi-central search server, which searches, and points back to the originating mirror in case of results are found.

Where is it going to come from? :)

We can name ch.php.net as search.php.net at the first place. Then you are a member of systems@ I guess. There are often proposals to host an nth mirror site in the US or elsewhere, which we turn down because of the current limitations. They would be good candidates for such services. BTW I think that a standalone search-only server would be good with some strong search engine, but for now, ch.php.net can handle the load I guess. [maintainer included in CC]

If we can set all the right hints for dedicated internet search engines, why should we burden ourselves with that?

See the other thread. They have very poor indexes for mirror sites, have weak support for language dependant searching, etc. Goba