I have the Jquery auto complete currently implemented for searching movie names. I have it starting a 2 characters with a 150ms delay in between.
I have a PHP and Mysql DB behind it that does a like '%term%' search to return the results.
I find this is pretty slow and database intensive.
I tried using Mysql's full text search, but didn't have much luck - perhaps I wasn't using the right match type.
Can someone suggest tweaks to the mysql full text or whether I should go straight to an indexing solution like Lucene or Sphinx and if they work well on partial matches with only 1-3 characters?