Reducing `min search term length` to 2?

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A user, rahim123, is considering reducing the min search term length to 2 on their large English language forum, which has close to 3M posts and DMs, to improve on-page searches for 2-character technical keywords. Although they found that reducing the limit is technically possible, they are concerned about the potential impact on server performance. pfaffman suggests trying it out and monitoring the results, as the actual impact will depend on the server’s specifications and tunable settings. rahim123 inquires about the effects of later reverting the change back to 3, specifically whether the search index would be rebuilt from scratch.

1

Hi there, our forum has quite a few 2-character technical keywords. For now I kept my min search term length at the default of 3. This is fine for site-wide searches, because if an additional search term >=3 chars is added it appears that it does also weight the 2-char terms for the results. But on-page searches for 2-char terms in long threads that haven’t been fully loaded into the buffer can be a problem. Ideally it would be nice if the Discourse inner-topic search would work for 2 characters, but it appears there’s some reason why it hasn’t been implemented yet:

Meanwhile, how much of a hit would it take on the server in terms of processing time and database size if the min search term length were reduced to 2 on a large English language forum?

2

I did it once on a pretty large forum for the same reason. It seemed to work fine.

I think the only way to know how big a hit it would be would be to try. What is “big” how “big” is your server?" How fast? How much RAM? And then there are a bunch of things you could tune.

3

Close to 3M posts and DMs. 4 CPU threads and 8GB of RAM.

If I reduce it to 2 and then increase it to 3 later on will it drop the previous search index and start from scratch?