Search a joined table

[Nolan E]

Hope I'm posting in the right place. Cant figure this one out. I'm doing a query like:

select * from first
left join second on first.id = second.first_id
where
match (second.content) against ('nolanpro' IN BOOLEAN MODE)
or
match (first.content) against ('nolanpro' IN BOOLEAN MODE)

and it is extremely slow!

If I remove the word "left" it runs very fast but I need left because there is not always an entry in 'second' for pointing to 'first' (so its null, and that's cool with me). But It runs for over 90 seconds on a macbook ubuntu, so I don't think its a performance issue.

Each table has a couple thousand rows. Same problem if I replace match/against with like. It also fixes the problem if I replace the word 'or' with 'and' but I need 'or'.

Any ideas? (server version 5.0.67-0ubuntu6)