You can get a significant boost in performance using Sphinx Search instead of your database server to search for users and notices. . Configuration ------------- In StatusNet's configuration, you can adjust the following settings under 'sphinx': enabled: Set to true to enable. Default true. server: a string with the hostname of the sphinx server. Default localhost port: an integer with the port number of the sphinx server. Default 3312 Requirements ------------ To use a Sphinx server to search users and notices, you also need to install, compile and enable the sphinx pecl extension for php on the client side, which itself depends on the sphinx development files. "pecl install sphinx" should take care of that. Add "extension=sphinx.so" to your php.ini and reload apache to enable it. You can update your MySQL or Postgresql databases to drop their fulltext search indexes, since they're now provided by sphinx. You will also need a Sphinx server to serve the search queries. On the sphinx server side, a script reads the main database and build the keyword index. A cron job reads the database and keeps the sphinx indexes up to date. scripts/sphinx-cron.sh should be called by cron every 5 minutes, for example. scripts/sphinx.sh is an init.d script to start and stop the sphinx search daemon. Server configuration -------------------- scripts/gen_config.php can generate a sphinx.conf file listing MySQL data sources for your databases. You may need to tweak paths afterwards. $ plugins/SphinxSearch/scripts/gen_config.php > sphinx.conf If you wish, you can build a full config yourself based on sphinx.conf.sample