Question : Search is slow

Hi All,
I am running one index server
two web front end servers that do crawling, service web applications, and run other applications (excel services, document conversion),
one server to hold SQL 2005 Enterprise database.  
A total of four sites are running SharePoint.  

The problem is the search performance.  It takes 6 seconds to return results.  Some times it takes less than a second to return results.  What could be causing search to take up to 8 seconds to return results but then sometimes performs normally?  Even 2 seconds is not acceptable--no other sites I've seen on the Internet take longer than a second to return search results.

Answer : Search is slow

CPU, memory and deadlocks will not always indicate performance problems.  'Spotlight on SQL' or 'Spotlight on Windows' might spot many other issues that are not apparent in PerfMon such as excessive disk I/O or too many open SQL connections.

There is no harm in trying those products so why not try them?

Sharepoint actually stores indexed content in two places, the SQL database and the index folder.  When Sharepoint search Sharepoint sites it stores the index results in the database, when it searches non-Sharepoint sites it stores the index results in the index folder.  It's strange but true.  I got it first hand from Microsoft.