>>The right way to do this is via Asynchronous request processing and offloading the query to another machine if the CPU load is heavy for this task. In addition, to freeing the server pool and not tying up IIS threads, you also get a chance to provide feedback as you're doing the search to let your users actually see something happening.
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>Thanks, if I have to keep the same infrastructure, I'll go with asynchronous mode for that specific situation. But, because of PHDBase issues I have, I am thinking of using SQL Server for the search engine. The test I did two years ago were equal to PHDBase. However, I haven't tested with a large table which is what I will do shortly.

I haven't tested this but I'm actually surprised to hear you say that. I was not impressed by Sql Server's indexed performance of text last time I tried. The biggest issue was how slow and resource intensive the indexing was.

FWIW, going the Async route does not require a separate machine - you can do it all on a single machine, but of course you'll CPU contention conditions if the lookups are processing intensive. Going to SQL Server helps to offload in this situation, especially if the SQL Server will be primarily used to do the index related data management and not much else.

+++ Rick ---