[Mark Barnes]

@_ck_:

I currently have:

have_query_cache: YES

query_cache_limit 1048576

query_cache_min_res_unit 4096

query_cache_size 16777216

query_cache_type ON

query_cache_wlock_invalidateOFF

though I’ve got plenty of RAM to tweak this. I don’t want to just throw RAM at poorly optimised queries though.

The simple query you mentioned takes 2 seconds for me (uncached). MATCH AGAINST with a full-text index takes 0.3 seconds. Keeping a full-text index only increased the database size by 30% in my case. That’s well worth while in the days where disk space is so cheap. The regular expression executes even quicker (0.2s), but as you say does not do partial words.

There’s no reason why the core can’t have an option for full-text in the settings page, with two different search methods depending on what is chosen. It would only take 20 or so lines of code.