Cloudflare incompatibility?

How large is your site? If you try searching for a word that only appears once in the database, do you still get the error, or is just for searching common words?

Do you get the errors when Relevanssi is disabled?

What’s odd is the search will immediately generate a dynamic list in the drop down of our search box, however when you actually hit enter or visit the URL for the results based on the query, you’ll get this time out issue.

The site is a paid member site with about 6,000 members and 2,000 querable posts. I reduced the output to 50, which in theory should work, but it’s still timing out on words or queries with a LOT of results (something big like chicken vs something small like “pop tarts”).

That dynamic drop down is not generated by Relevanssi, so it doesn’t have anything to do with the problem in hand.

2000 posts is not much and should not cause a problem on a good server. I wonder if the server timeout limit is somehow really low? Do you get the error immediately, or after waiting several seconds?

Even though it’s a member only site, you can see the results this way. As I mentioned earlier, it’s not every term – only those that apparently have a higher amount of results.

Low search volume example:
https://www.trimhealthymembership.com/?s=berries

High search volume example:
https://www.trimhealthymembership.com/?s=chocolate

This will also let you see how fast the error appears. Rackspace currently has this timeout set to 30 seconds, so any search taking longer will generate the error page. I had them increase it to 60 seconds, but then the search just times out and we get a white screen (no error message).

That search is really slow even when successful. Do you have “Limit searches” enabled and if so, what’s the setting? Try setting it to 200, if it’s not enabled or is higher.

If that doesn’t help, I think the best solution for you is to use a faster search than Relevanssi.

I had limit searches set to 50, so all good there. Previously it was 200, and NO results were being generated, so 50 at least lets the lower hanging fruit in.

What other plugins would you recommend besides Relevanssi for speed?

Pretty much anything that is not hosted on your own server. AddSearch is super fast in my experience, Swiftype should be quite fast.

There’s certainly something odd going on, if your server can’t handle the 200 limit – that’s already really low. I wonder if you have some heavy customizations involved.

No customizations on the plugin that I know of – we’re running a 4 slave server setup on Rackspace so it has more than enough capability here.

Its just weird that terms with higher volumes of results will crap out while smaller terms won’t. It makes me wonder if there isn’t something wrong with the limiter itself (since we have it set to 50).

Nothing weird about that, the high volumes are the problem. Rare term = less posts = less memory usage = no problems.

The limiter is very simple, just a “LIMIT 50” added on to the MySQL query, that should be pretty foolproof.

It would be interesting to debug this case a bit further, to see what part of the search process is actually taking the time, but that’s more work than is possible for me to do for the free version support.

Can you show me a screen shot of your complete Relevanssi settings?

Sorry for the delay in responding. Because the page is so long it’s not easily screencaptured and my usual tool for grabbing doesn’t work for logged-in sites. Do you have a recommendation for how to get this info to you?

The top of the page is most interesting part.