Reducing `min search term length` to 2?

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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?

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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.

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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?

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