Network speed, NIC card speeds, antivirus scanning.

nope, no antivirus installed yet, quickbooks is blazing fast. this is a sage issue

What are you searching? How big is your database? Does it go faster if you do it on server or different workstation?

yes much faster on the server, (17 seconds) DB is 172MB text search all clients checked all slips checked

If faster on server then it is network communications or workstation not Timeslips 

nope, we only replaced the server, cabling, gigabit switch, workstation all the same. new server has SSD raid 5, windows server 2016. everything else , (quick books, needles, and general file transfer are much faster than the old server. it did improve after the april update, but there is still something wrong. a reprint bills is much faster than on the old server.. it's just the text search that's painfully slow

You said the magic word in "RAID 5".  Well known to be horrifically slow on reads, especially rapidly recurring reads.  Google 'RAID5 Slow read' and look through the over 1-million hits from very respectable forums and websites.

IOW, and as Nancy pointed out, this isn't a Timeslips or SQL issue.