AskMe Timeout

August 7, 2005 12:05 PM

Ask keeps timing out on me when I do searches for anything except "questions only". I get: "The request has exceeded the allowable time limit Tag: CFQUERY..." In case it's relevant, I'm searching for stars of the lid. I'm on Safari 2.0.
posted by dobbs to Bugs at 12:05 PM (6 comments total)

Yeah, it's searching through 350,000 answers, via a brute force method. If that takes more than 30 seconds, it will stop and fail. There's no real solution to this, other than (like MetaFilter) I'll remove the option to search all the answers.

I'd suggest using yahoo or google for now.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 12:30 PM on August 7, 2005

Hmm. I don't find the google search function very useful at all. Searching for stars of the lid using the google search gives me this result.

Which doesn't include the thread I was looking for, which mentions stars of the lid twice.

But whatever, if you can't fix it you can't fix it. I just thought it was a bug.
posted by dobbs at 12:40 PM on August 7, 2005

Searching Yahoo with the query "site:ask.metafilter.com 'stars of the lid'" brings up the thread you were looking for as the eleventh result.
posted by catachresoid at 1:37 PM on August 7, 2005

Thanks, catachresoid.
posted by dobbs at 2:05 PM on August 7, 2005

There's no real solution to this
Well, you could try indexing everything; It'll be a fair amount of work to code up though, unless there's some CF library out there that does all the work.
posted by fvw at 8:44 PM on August 7, 2005

MySQL's FULLTEXT indexing is very fast and very easy to use. Of course, I have no idea what DB is being used here.
posted by wackybrit at 11:36 AM on August 9, 2005