You can get a significant boost in performance using Sphinx Search
instead of your database server to search for users and notices.
<http://sphinxsearch.com/>.
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
