slow performance with queries

[mark]

That's very odd. Even for a timeout you should get back a page that says timeout (unless you've set your script timeout to -1 or some huge number and it's the web client or server that's timing out). Check your vortex.log and webserver error log for corresponding events.

You can eliminate the webserver from the equation by performing SQL on the command line with texis.
texis -d /path/to/your/database -s "select ..."

Please also summarize the actual sql statement and queries you're using and what kind(s) of indices are on the fields being queried.

[phoebe]

It may have been webserver timeout. It doesn't happen very often, and it is not my main concern which is general slowness.
We run many crawls which feed the resulting databases to a main search database using a unique hash id to keep them distinct. The database now has 3+ million pages and growing. The searches seem to get slower as it grows.
If this doesn't resolve, we may have to split up the db abd piece the results together with relevance ranking. Will that run faster?
We are using the linux version with 2 G ram.

For this query, without the Catno clause, the performance is fine and using likep(not liker,like3) makes the speed tolerable.
Is there a reason why likep should not be used in the query instead of like for Catno?
The results are very different: the rank is completely off, but the pages don't seem to be less relevant.

select Url,Catno,count(*),$rank r from html where Title\Description\Keywords\Meta\Body likep 'breast cancer' and Catno likep 'a1 b5' group by Depth;

Title\Description\Keywords\Meta\Body is a metamorph inverted index
and
Catno is a regular metamorph index

[phoebe]

Also another oddity:
SQL 1>select Url,Catno,count(*),$rank r from html where Title\Description\Keywords\Meta\Body likep 'breast cancer' and Catno likep '+b3 +j9';
Url Catno count(*) r
------------+------------+------------+------------+
http://www.accc-cancer.org/ a0,b3,d2,g1, 100 183

j9 is not in the Catno field.