I now realize Robert was testing on staging, not production. Thankfully this pointed me to bloat on production, but I'm not sure why the staging timings are different to my production timings. RAM will be significant with production having gobs more available.
One other thing we can do is tear out the hyphenation handling in our ftq() helper function. A search for 'blu-ray' is converted to '(blu & ray) | bluray'. I'm suggesting this because I many examples of slow searches I get shown contain hyphens, as what people assume is a simple query isn't really.
I now realize Robert was testing on staging, not production. Thankfully this pointed me to bloat on production, but I'm not sure why the staging timings are different to my production timings. RAM will be significant with production having gobs more available.
One other thing we can do is tear out the hyphenation handling in our ftq() helper function. A search for 'blu-ray' is converted to '(blu & ray) | bluray'. I'm suggesting this because I many examples of slow searches I get shown contain hyphens, as what people assume is a simple query isn't really.