Separate searchindexes for frontend and control panel?

[KarlBishop]

We had some performance issues with bloat in our searchindex table.

I'm not sure what caused it to get so big but it was at 1.7 million rows ~270MB.

We've stripped it back for now by:

• Unticking "Use this field’s values as search keywords" on all custom fields
• Installing Oliver Stark's Relax plugin
• Clearing the table using TRUNCATE TABLE my_db_name.searchindex;
• Rebuilding the table by resaving entries, users and categories with the --update-search-index switch

The table is now down to 78 thousand rows ~15MB and search is much, much faster (if limited).

We plan to re-add custom fields to the searchindex after seeing how this performs for a while. But it occurred to me that most custom fields we used as search keywords were purely to benefit Control Panel users. The search form on the frontend leveraged only a couple of custom fields that were not intended for use in the CP.

This may be a crazy/stupid idea but I wondered if it would make sense to allow the use of separate searchindex tables for the frontend and CP?

[brandonkelly]

But it occurred to me that most custom fields we used as search keywords were purely to benefit Control Panel users.

I have a feeling there won’t be as much of a need for this in Craft 4+, thanks to element index filtering (#10075), which is more precise and efficient than search queries.

[KarlBishop]

Ahh OK, would this allow an Entries Query on a search results page (like the one in the docs) to specify a set of fields to filter against?

E.g. something like this?

{% set searchQuery = craft.app.request.getParam('q') %}
{% paginate craft.entries()
  .search(searchQuery)
  .filterFields(['title', 'subheadline', 'matrixContentBuilder:redactorField'])
  .section(['news', 'events', 'pressReleases'])
  .orderBy('score')
  .limit(12)
  .with(['heroImage'])
  as entries %}

[brandonkelly]

It will allow you to create filters/conditions for specific fields and attributes, using a typical condition builder/smart query UI.