You may have noticed that things have been less responsive than usual on stackoverflow.com. The culprit is SQL Server 2008 full-text search. I’ll let Brent explain:
Before 2008, full text search wasn’t inside the database – it wasn’t subject to things like transactions. Heck, it was more like Lucene where it lived outside on its own. Now, it’s stored inside data files and it’s subject to transactions. From what im hearing, blocking and locking is a completely new issue in 2008 FTS. There’s a big overhead involved with making it subject to transactions. …