Giving some further input on this to help the debug progess. When some of the
users couldn't get any search results returned on their machines, they moved
to a neighbor's machine (that had previously been successful in getting some
search results) and performed the search there and some users were able to get
results.
The same problems occured when the search term was "test" or "Datos
Meteorologicos." With the latter, people tried various pieces of the search
term. Some used the entire search term, others used just "datos" or "Datos"
and still were unable to get any search results.
Still other users tried re-booting Kepler and at least one user was successful
in getting search results after doing that.
A few users tried to limit the search to just metacat and were still
unsuccessful in getting any search results returned.
Regardless of whether users are searching across a large data set or several
large data sets, their expectation was some type of results, not a time out
(or the progress indicator just stopping with no results returned). Obviously
the moving progress indicator is what lets users know that things are still
working, and it is a nice feature. However, if we anticipate even more
slowness in the future, we will need to design some additional feedback, such
as letting the user know the system is searching data set 1, then data set 2
etc.