[@_ck_ Participant 16 years, 3 months ago]

But keeping a full-text index can get rather huge, which is probably why bbPress doesn’t use it by default.

BTW, MySQL 5.1 apparently has some nice improvements in fulltext search.

If you have your own dedicated or vps server you can tinker with some mysql settings to speed things up. (You never did answer if you have mysql cache turned on)