On 8/7/07, MESHine Team alerts@meshine.info wrote:
I issued this command on mysql (v5.0.45) command line: ALTER TABLE dewiki.text ADD FULLTEXT (old_text);
This command is running now for approx. 20 hours (!) not showing up any errors. Apparently MySQL server is up and running. (W2kSP4; MySQL v5.0.45; Intel Pentium M 1,7 GHz, 512 RAM; mysql-nt.exe is using 152.760 kb constantly)
There is only 1 active thread: Command: Query; Time 74059; State: copy to tmp_table; Info: ALTER TABLE dewiki.text ADD FULLTEXT (old_text);
Sounds about right. I believe it took a few hours on my similarly-sized forum post table a year or so back, but that was on a dual P4 Xeon 2.0 GHz with 4 GB RAM. Make sure there's more than enough room in your temp folder for it to copy the table a few times over, and it should finish eventually.
By comparison, I've heard that Sphinx takes a couple of minutes to index something that size or even larger. I assume Lucene (also being a dedicated search solution) would be similarly fast. There *is* a reason Wikipedia doesn't use MySQL fulltext search, and I think you're seeing that now.