Rudi Ahlers wrote: >>>>> What else could cause this kind of problem? >>>> You only have 449MB free on /tmp. It could easily fill that up during the >>>> query, and then delete the file before you run df again. Run it while the >>>> query is executing, I bet you see /tmp filling up. >>>> >>> Thanx, that seems to have solved the problem. I didn't think of >>> checking to see if the tmp folder got full during the SQL statement >>> execution. So, by increasing it to 1GB, the problem is solved >> I've seen mysql do dumb stuff like building a huge temp table in a 3-way >> join before evaluating any of the WHEN clause that would eliminate most >> of it, but does it really have to make a copy of a single table to pick >> a random chunk? >> > > This could very well be the case. The website in question is written > in PERL (yea, I know.....) and the client doesn't really pay much for > us to look into the code to see if it can be optimized either. So I > just have to make sure the VPS copes with it. But for now it's working > fine :) There's nothing inherently wrong with perl for web programming and it doesn't have anything at all to do with the query passed to mysql. There are some quirks with apache/mod_perl that might matter for efficiency, though. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com