Quote Originally Posted by Laraul View Post
/itemsearch doesn't query the servers.
Yes, it does. It includes data about what's stored with our retainers, and that information only exists in the database.

(That's the whole reason why extra inventory space is with our retainers rather than with our characters, so that it does NOT take up memory while we're playing, only when we go to the retainer bell and call it up, or use a more specific database query like /itemsearch to find a select portion of it. The rest of the time, the client software doesn't know what our retainers have. Nor does the server we're directly connected to, which hosts the local part of Eorzea that we're in. The world server will query the database server on our behalf when we ask it to, but neither it nor our client keeps that data in memory.)