sebbacon/alaveteli — Issue #310: type ahead search crashes servers with large xapian databases
Author: sebbacon
Created: 2011-12-21 13:32:55+00:00
State: open

The way we are doing partial word matching (using wildcards) causes Xapian to expand the wildcard to all possible matches that it has indexed. In a large database a search for "a*" or similar will cause a good proportion of the entire database to be loaded into memory, thus crashing the server.

As an interim fix, don't use wildcard searches (and only search when we have three letters or more).