My PHP site is an online store with about 5k products. Products belong to a vendor, a category, and possibly a subcategory. Each of those items has a name and the products have descriptions.

The search queries we've set up work wonderfully, but tend to run pretty slow. They range between 0.20s and 30s (yes 30 seconds). We've optimized like crazy and I'm starting to think we're out of room to improve on that front, so we're caching them and that's making life a lot easier.

But when they run they are still killing the server, because what appears to be all of the table locking that comes with MyISAM.

So on to my question: Is there a way for us to use InnoDB (row-level locking) and still maintain FULLTEXT? Should we move our DB offsite and use a service like DB2? Is there some other search engine type software we should use instead?

Any help is greatly appreciated :)