fts-relaxation-budget-caps-at-50
IN premise
Progressive FTS5 search relaxation — dropping query terms via combinations when the full-term query returns no results — is capped at `_MAX_RELAXATION_QUERIES` (50) to prevent combinatorial blowup on many-term queries.
Summary
When a full-text search finds no results, the system tries progressively simpler versions of the query by dropping terms. But the number of possible term combinations grows exponentially, so there is a hard cap of 50 attempts to keep search responsive and prevent the server from grinding through thousands of query variations on long search phrases.
Details
| Source | entries/2026/05/11/reasons_lib-api.md |