Warning: Do not run a bare <tvar|insreg>insource:/regexp/</> search. It will probably timeout after 20 seconds anyway, while blocking responsible users.
is this a bad joke?
Topic on Help talk:CirrusSearch
No, it is a serious warning.
Am I missing something? But why should making a search query block someone???
Probably due to some serialization in handling the search request that results in the server being unable to respond to other requests in a timely fashion.
@Clump, from Help:CirrusSearch#Insource:
Regex scan all the textual characters in a given list of pages; they don't have a word index to speed things up, […]
And in Help:CirrusSearch#Regular expression searches:
A regex search actually scours each page in the search domain character-by character. By contrast, an indexed search actually queries a few records from a database separately maintained from the wiki database, […]
In context of Mediawiki blocking means a certain admin's action.
Primarly “to block” is just a verb and has not only this meaning you apparently think of, cf. e.g block - český překlad - slovník bab.la or more verbous Překladač Google (searched this for you). In this case it means the servers are in worst case unreachable for others, so these “responsible users” are blocked from using these servers.
Generally speaking most terms with more meanings have a dominant interpretation. You can probably understand that the dominant interpretation of "USA" is not United Scenic Artists or United Soccer Association. I'm sure that in context of Mediawiki the dominant interpretation of the verb "to block" is not "just a verb" but "to remove edit right". (Accordingly the dominant interpretation of "image" is image file and not "A characteristic of a person, group or company etc., style, manner of dress, how one is, or wishes to be, perceived by others." Etc.)
PS: I'm most active at Wiktionary. No need to tell me what a verb means or how to find it.
Well, my first language is not English, and I am sure I am far from perfect understanding, but I know that for every word we have to look at the context, and I think I understood it right here.
This said a tip for you: Next time you want to point to a potential wrong use of a word here or elsewhere do not caption it with “bad joke”. End of discussion for me.
Zabavuju, like Speravir, I didn't interpret "block" in the admin sense, since I'm familiar with how regex searches work—they can be very computationally expensive, so they can tie up the search servers, and only a limited number are allowed to run at once, so even if the servers aren't too busy overall, running very expensive regexe searches can temporarily "block" other users from running more reasonable regex searches.
I took your "bad joke" comment to refer to the somewhat hostile tone of the documentation; I run bare insource regex queries fairly regularly because there's no other way to get the info I need, plus they aren't super expensive on much smaller wikis. I generally try not to get involved in issues of style and tone in the documentation, only technical accuracy, so I didn't get involved in the discussion when it first started. It wasn't until reading over it today that I saw the further replies and now see the issue.
Anyway, as a sometime copyeditor, I think that any text that is potentially confusing should be edited for clarity. It doesn't matter whether 95% or 5% of people are going to misread "block" as an admin action. It's easy enough to use another word. I'll edit it from my volunteer account, since this isn't a technical issue.
@TJones (WMF)/Trey314159: Thank you for your edit. And again: I think most of the discussion could have been avoided with a different title and first posting in a neutral tone. So, I misunderstood the intention of the thread starter.