Well I'm an idiot - the fulltext index on page_text was missing from a default installation. It didn't break searches but probably slowed them down tremendously. Also set engine to MyISAM on page_text to avoid cryptic error messages from MySQL.
<?php
/**
* debugConsole includes
*
* @author Andreas Demmer <info@debugconsole.de>
* @see <http://www.debugconsole.de>
* @version 1.0.0
* @package debugConsole_1.2.1
*/
$path = dirname(__FILE__) . '/';
require_once $path . 'debugConsole.config.php';
require_once $path . 'debugConsole.class.php';
require_once $path . 'debugConsole.functions.php';
?>