Speedup suggestions - Wikitech-l

8 Feb 2002

Browsing around on http://www.mysql.com/documentation/ and comparing
with the wikipedia.sql in cvs, I have the following suggestions:

1) To speed up searches, we should use a FULLTEXT index on title and
   text, and then use the match operator. That should also yield more
   relevant results.
   (http://www.mysql.com/doc/F/u/Fulltext_Search.html)

2) In special_recentchanges.php, we select with "WHERE
   cur_timestamp>$mindate", but cur_timestamp is not indexed. This
   means that mysql linearly searches through the whole cur database,
   everytime somebody views RecentChanges.

3) Assuming that php runs as an apache module, we should use
   persistent database connections. That way, we won't repeatedly send
   over the username and password; one connection is reused by apache
   even after the php script dies.
   (http://www.phpbuilder.com/manual/features.persistent-connections.php
   and http://www.phpbuilder.com/manual/function.mysql-pconnect.php)

Axel