Ok, I have rebooted the server, that got the search function working. I then repaired the tables, checked and analyzed the tables...so far so good. At this point, the fun begins...raw numbers...the database has 223 tables, and is 1.8GiB in size. THIS IS A BIG DATABASE. When I attempted to optimize the database, phpmyadmin spun and loaded a 500 Internal Server Error, an error that the server and browser does not know what happened. My best guess is that it timed out. I then tried to optimize just the posts table, which is 80.5MiB by itself. This made MySQL crash. After restarting MySQL again, the site is upand the search is working again...for now.
If the problem is tied to the immense size of the database, is there a way to have the search function ignore a portion of the oldest posts? I'm thinking that I'd rather be able to search for newer posts only than not be able to search at all. (I don't know anything about databases! )
It might be a software problem, or the size of the DB....the problem with a table as large as the posts is that you have to query it for every post. In all honesty, I am surprised that the site loads as fast as it does. Also, there's no way to limit the search to a timeframe.