Reality sank in last week when we were looking at performance graphs in google webmaster tools that over time our page times have crept up to nearly 5 seconds a page as the content on our site had grown to over 62,000 stores an 250,000 coupons. It dawned on us that the rate at which google had been taking pages from our website decreased and our traffic had been relatively stable as this process happened…
 
As you can see from the attached graph, times on the site were blowing out to crazy levels. This meant Google slowed down spidering new pages from our site, which in turn meant we slowed down our natural growth.
Looking at our database, it was thought we should reduce the amount of fields which we searched on to improve performance, but that would have reduced the functionality on the site. Instead we decided to create special full text indexes that have dropped the page load times even for complex searches to the lowest they have EVER been! We implemented MySQL full text indexes over multiple text fields that we search on, and page times are now lower than .3 of a second!!! Machine load is down from 10-15 during peak to about .7 So as you can see hitting indexes in MySQL for all search queries means your machine can actually handle more traffic and be less loaded if designed right.
As soon as page times dropped google started taking more pages from our site again, we are hoping more traffic will follow more indexed pages also.
And! You can now surf for cool stuff like quality unit coupons and japan video games coupon