Epsiloncool on "[Plugin: WP FullText Search] Does not improve search speed in many cases"

I installed this plugin as a possible alteative to Solr or Sphinx powered search plugins because not having to manage them would be a big plus.

Before I get to the reason for 2 stars, I'll say that the author did a really good job on the backend. It was very low-friction to set up, and the AJAX indexing interface is stellar.

Unfortunately, this plugin has 2 major issues that I discovered:

1. We only have roughly 20k posts. The plugin, however, decided that the number is "In Index: 312044 posts," and it took several days to spin up this index. I don't know how it's possible (maybe it doesn't disregard revisions or something, which is a pretty big omission), but changing anything at all about indexing that would require a reindex suddenly becomes prohibitively expensive.

2. More importantly, the search speed is only improved in some cases, whereas in others it gets worse in my tests. A simple search for "table" took 55 seconds (our Linode servers are pretty beefy, it's not a slow shared hosting env or something). Searching for something like "black" or "white" took about 6s with the plugin on, and about 1.8s with WP's own search.

Perhaps there's a missing db index or two somewhere, but right now the plugin gets a fail from me.