Karl Katzke

I would heavily dissuade you from letting MySQL do full-text searching. It is currently very slow and you will take a big hit in system resources. Instead, I would suggest you consider some other alternatives, like Sphinx or Lucene. I can’t say much for Lucene, as I haven’t used it personally, but we used Sphinx originally for full-text searching, which it can do within a fraction of a second for even complex searches. However, since the most recent version, it also supports adding filters on other fields, which means that you can with a bit of effort effectively discard sending complex queries to MySQL on large datasets, instead letting Sphinx do the heavy work and passing the id’s to MySQL to get the resulting records… and all very very very fast.