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Originally Posted by patgallant View Post
I have also noticed (and this was pre-iOS 4.2) that typing in the search is sluggish. I will bring up the search box and start typing and it will take several seconds for the first letter to appear. Once the first letter appears typing is smooth after that.
This is because it is a dynamic match going on. When you type the first character, it has to find all of the entries in the database that contain that character, and compute and draw the display of the incremental results. When you type the second character, you've already narrowed the search space considerably, and by the third character it hardly has any work to do. I'm assuming we aren't talking about a pathological situation like searching for a string that appears in every single action, of course!

I suggested (via Send Feedback) that the search code might be modified to not actually start searching until at least 2 characters had been entered, or a suitable interval (maybe a second?) had passed since the last character was entered. If you experiment a bit with pasting strings into the search box, you'll probably see as I did that this is a much faster approach when you don't care about the initial incremental search results, and seems to do almost no harm when you do.