Searching performance

[Eric Hildum]

Title: Searching performance

I just tried a search of the contents of my mail for a message I send several months ago. Currently, I have about 5000 messages without attachments stored, and was searching for a single, 18 letter (English) word. The search took almost 2 hours to complete on a 500MHz system! That is incredibly bad – what is the problem? Isn’t searching done with a DFA?

Eric Hildum