It sounds like you either need a substantial rethink of how your application works and does its work or you need some database optimization foo.

The former is hard to guess at without more information on the system, but the latter is easy enough to take a few shot at.

• Are you using MyISAM tables? Consider switching the tables that are getting "congested" to InnoDB.
• Is it the caching table that's getting congested with reads and writes? Maybe you can do your caching more effectively? (Maybe use memcached?)
• Maybe you can partition your data? Have "cat reservations" on one database server and "dog reservations" on another.
• Also be sure to do all the "usual" MySQL optimization tricks (is it using the proper amount of memory? Do you have proper indexes on all tables? Enable the slow query log and check with EXPLAIN SELECT ... that all your queries are using indexes when possible. If it's not possible, rethink your table schema.

You might find the slides from my ApacheCon/MySQL UC/OSCON talk useful.

- ask (available for short contracts working on that sort of problems)

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.