iFORCE said:
so you don't mass search which clogs up server powa.
i would love to see a plot of server load vs search interval. i'm willing to concede that if the search interval was set to 0, server load could get very high, but i bet it drops off very quickly. i bet there's an insignificant difference between setting the interval a 5 or 60 seconds.
using numbers from the front page: there are ~4000 members, and right now there are ~40 online. i don't know what the statistics are for use, but 1% on at a time sounds reasonable. of those 1% on at a given time, let's say 10% of them are searching for something (given the number of repeated questions, i'd be willing to say that 0% are searching). so that's 4 people that would be searching. that's not too bad. i don't know how big the database is, but searching for keywords can't be that hard.
i understand that setting the interval is also good for preventing the trolls and other bad users from repeatadly searching just for the sake of bringing down the site, but again a small 5sec interval would discourage them. just like on unix, if you type in your password wrong, it purposly waits a few seconds before you get a second chance. this makes it significantly harder to do a coordinated attack, but it's still reasonably easy for the legitimate user to deal with.
sorry for the long rant, but the 60sec search interval has bothered me for a long time, i just never got around to complaining about it
