Very slow MySQL performance

[Dave M G]

	Thank you for your continued assistance.

> [SR] Kick off a request and monitor the output from top ...
> [SR]post your findings back here and we'll see if we can tell you
> [SR]anything.  I should point out that I'm no mysql expert.

	Okay, these are the results from "top", captured pretty much in the
middle of simply selecting to view the structure of a database in
phpMyAdmin. The task took about 10 seconds to execute.

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
 9351 root      16   0 88684  15m 5424 R 43.4  6.1  36:18.90 Xorg
17323 dave      15   0  134m  37m  13m S 32.9 14.9  20:51.49 firefox-bin
20989 dave      15   0 37916  11m 8192 S  6.6  4.5   0:12.05
gnome-terminal
 9944 www-data  15   0 17000 6772 3236 S  4.9  2.6   0:20.68 apache2
21345 dave      16   0  2132 1120  844 R  1.0  0.4   0:00.35 top
11403 mysql     17   0  117m 3744 1956 S  0.7  1.5   0:38.50 mysqld
   93 root      15   0     0    0    0 D  0.3  0.0   0:05.59 kswapd0
 8857 hal       16   0  1864  448  432 S  0.3  0.2   0:01.84
hald-addon-stor
 8859 hal       17   0  1868  452  432 S  0.3  0.2   0:01.94
hald-addon-stor
 9937 mldonkey  15   0 41232  13m 2068 S  0.3  5.3   3:37.17 mlnet
    1 root      16   0  1564  460  432 S  0.0  0.2   0:02.08 init
    2 root      34  19     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:03.51 ksoftirqd/0
    3 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.20 events/0
    4 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.03 khelper
    5 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kthread
    7 root      20  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kacpid
   63 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:01.15 kblockd/0

I hope this comes out legible enough in your mail reader.

Does this give any indication of what is moving so slowly?

--
Dave M G