Irrelevant results and very slow to show search results

  • WPChina

    (@wordpresschina)


    6 years, 7 months ago

    I just deactivated my Relevanssi Premium plugin. After using it for about a year, I finally had to stop it because:

    1) Every time a user conducted a search, the entire website “hangs” for up to 8-10 seconds before showing results. I followed all the instructions about indexing (and the server is on AWS and uses Cloudflare and WP Rocket, so it’s not a php.ini or slow server issue).

    2) The final problem happened today when it was really showing very irrelevant results. After I deactivated the plugin, WordPress own results were perfect and showed me exactly the best results.

    I asked for support a few times over the past year and the support was fantastic and fast, and I’m willing to try again later if the plugin can work on my site.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Plugin Author Mikko Saari

    (@msaari)

    1) How big is your site? How many posts approximately? If you have more than thousand posts, enabling the throttle is a good idea, and should help a lot with the speed.

    Often the biggest factor in search speed is not actual searching, but creating excerpts. If your search results show lots of excerpts, you use character-based excerpt length and your posts are long, then yes, I can see searching taking 10 seconds per search.

    If that is the case, disabling the custom excerpts should make the search notably faster. If it does, then it’s time to take a critical look at your excerpt settings.

    2) Would your site happen to be in Chinese? If that’s the case, then no wonder – Relevanssi cannot come up with relevant results in Chinese, it’s just not possible. Relevanssi can handle Chinese and Japanese characters, but in these languages Relevanssi can’t tell where one word ends and another begins, which means the results won’t make any sense.

    If your site was not in Chinese, can you please elaborate? Just in case there’s some bug in Relevanssi logic that could be fixed.

    • This reply was modified 6 years, 7 months ago by Mikko Saari.
    Thread Starter WPChina

    (@wordpresschina)

    Hi: thanks for your fast response!

    1) The site has about 11,000 posts. I tried throttling it a few months ago and haven’t seen much difference. So you mean I should disable searching/indexing excerpts?

    2) The site is in English, so tokenization is not an issue. I’m unsure too why the irrelevant searches were showing. I actually have a staging server and demo site setup for development and will take a look at it over the coming week. Your idea about removing excerpt searches sounds good and that is the first thing i will check.

    Plugin Author Mikko Saari

    (@msaari)

    With that many posts, the throttle is a must. It will cut the results to 500 posts per search term, which should be enough to make sure that is not the issue.

    I’m not talking about indexing excerpts – that shouldn’t have any effect on search performance. I’m talking about custom excerpts generated by Relevanssi. That’s the slow part of searching, sometimes much slower than the actual search.

    So I’d start by disabling custom excerpts completely. Does that make the search perform better? If it doesn’t, then I guess you’re out of luck with Relevanssi, and should probably look for faster search solutions (ElasticPress, SOLR, Swiftype etc.).

    If it does, then you may want to take a look at your excerpt settings. Make sure the excerpt length is based on words, not characters (using words is several times faster than using characters). You can also add this to your theme functions.php to make the excerpt-building faster:

    add_filter( 'relevanssi_optimize_excerpts', '__return_true' );

    As for the irrelevant searches, once you have the demo site set up and can provide some concrete examples, I’d be happy to look at them.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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