Full Text Query Starts Slow

I've created a FullTextCatalog on one of my Databases and added a full text index on one of my text columns.

The first time I run a query against the data it takes roughly 40-45 seconds to return data. After that it blazes and runs in under a second. If I don't query it for 20-30 minutes, it will take 40-45 seconds again and then fly until the next break.

Is there a configuration setting somewhere that I'm missing on this? Currently the Index is only about 5MB so it should take that long to read in when I'm querying it.

I don't think it has anything to do with size because the actual return can contain anywhere from 10-80K rows and the speed is about the same.

I'm using Standard edition on a 2003 Standard Server if that plays into the potential problem at all. We're currently downloading and installing the new Service Pack to see if that fixes it, but for some reason I'm not holding my breath. I'm assuming that there is something we need to change in the configuration.

Let me know if I'm missing any pertinent information. Thanks.http://www.sql-server-performance.com/full_text_search.asp & http://www.sql-server-performance.com/tb_search_optimization.asp for your action & information|||I have verified that nothing is being populated at the time I'm running these queries, so the first one should be the problem. We'll be loading 500,000 records per day once in the morning. I have the Catalog set to manual population, so that I re-populate after the load has completed.

In 2005 I didn't think that it had to go out to the MS Search searvice? I thought it was now all contained within SQL Server. In any regards, this is happening exactly the same way regard less of the query or amount of data returned. A call just to ContainsTable() with no other joins that returns 3 or 70.000 rows takes roughly the same amount of time.sql