Search performance/speed - SearchUnit - Forum

I've been running some simple tests with content categories. One of my content categories is authors' names. The author's name is also included in the text of the documents. I've been doing three searches for each test:

1. A single word (such as "church").
2. A single word ("church") plus an author's name as a content category in the search options ("Smith").
3. The author's name plus the search word ("Smith church") without any content categories in the search options.

In each case, as I've varied the search word between words that are common and others that are less frequent in our documents, case 3 is much quicker than case 2, by a factor of 2:1 or greater.

We have about 80,000 documents in our index. As an example of the three cases, case 1 resulted in 16,332 documents (search results) in 1.07 sec. Case 2 gave 304 documents in 0.60 sec. Case 3 gave 360 documents in 0.20 sec.

Is there a performance hit generally for using content categories? I would have expected content categories to quickly reduce the number of documents needing to be checked for the search word(s), and so be able to do it quicker.

Thanks!

Dan

Okay. Thanks for the explanation, Jim! I'll keep that in mind in redesigning our search capabilities.

Dan