>>The database size is so large that many times the searched encounter time outs If you're maintaining the site as a one-man show therefore wearing a hat as a DBA among others I suggest a couple of things for this problem: The problem isn't the database size; this could be related to a number of issues but usually can be solved using one of the solutions below : -The first thing I'd do is to check whether your tables utilize indexing and clustering properly; this is a common problem among searches that take too long... -If that doesn't help I'd look at the connection_timeout variable (set it to reasonable amount of miliseconds); make sure you're pooling your connections- makes things a lot faster after the first invocation. The pooling should have enough buffer size (closer to maximum allowed for greater performance) -If that doesn't take care of it then your SQL queries may need re-working; try to optimize them, i.e. try to use inner joins instead of sub-queries, you could possibly use col numbers instead of fields, decrease the number of views to a minimum if you use any... -If the above three dont' do it then the culprit could be the RAM in your physical machine (install enough of it)... -If the above four suggested solutions don't cut it then I must say you must have upwards of a million records (which I doubt) and truly need some other alternative- if you are willing and have time you could enrich your site using AJAX architecture; the amount of records really wouldn't matter in this case... HTH.