Is there really a slowdown issue when using custom scopes in searching for contents in Sharepoint 2007? How do you resolve this?
I experience the slowdown every after 3 or 4 tries (so the first tries work just fine). I'm using a custom masterpage but the same issue is encountered in OOB portals (using default masterpage).
If there was a problem with scopes you would experience it in the first query as subsequent queries would use the cached results of the first query.
Could it be that the server is running out of memory? If you install everything (SP + Database) on a machine with less than 4GB RAM you can run out of memory very soon, resulting in severe paging.
Installing the latest Service Pack (SP2) and Cumulative Updates helps, as SP2 and the October 2009 CU fixed a lot of resource leaks.
In any case, you should check both the Event Log and Sharepoint's log file for any suspicious messages that occur when you run your searches.
Thank you for your replies!
Problem is already solved! I just had to delete the Federated Search Results Web Parts which Sharepoint put there by default. I got the idea from this page: http://alittlestrange.com/tfoa/2009/10/05/sharepointmoss-search-results-page-slow-to-access-clicked-link/
Hope this helps others too.