Thanks again Jay for a thoughtful response. I'm keeping files on the stats thru out the day and I'm mostly concentrating on Key Reads, Key Writes, tmp tables created, tmp tables to disk, and queries pruned and queries not cached. I've got my key reads & writes in the acceptable zone. The others are not.

I'm also suddenly getting a LOT of aborted connections. phpMyAdmin made it appear at first glance to be the server connections but on closer inspection that number has rarely changed (it's been 55 for a long while now). It's the client connections that has suddenly jumped and continues too (30,506 in 10 days). It started jumping when something went wrong with the hardware (but none of us here seem to know what it is as the colo isn't saying -- could be a router?). Not sure if I can tweak the server for that.

I went thru the software code here and pointed out all the SELECT * queries. I think I've got the programmers here to stop doing that with their code. It's the forum 3rd party software. I don't think any database person has analyzed phpBB in a LONG LONG time and while this code is NOT phpBB it looks like the database stuff was taken from it. Luckily the code we're using has been discontinued. They have encouraged me to look at other forum software and make a recommendation. And SELECT * in queries is on my list as well as the schema.

In the meantime I have to speed up the queries of the software we have and like I susprected my query_cache_limit needs to be raised. I raised it to 16M to start and see if I see some drop off. I know I'll probably have to raise it again. I'm cautious as I don't have access to this server and can't see how my changes effect the System. I only have access to phpMyAdmin -- so it feels like I'm working in the dark here.

I'm now greping thru our code to see if I can find queries with functions in them. Then I'll start looking at the sorts of functions they're using. BUT most of my slow queries come down to TWO select statements. So first I'll go thru the explain with them and see how many rows are returned. Is it possible to find out the size of the query?? (meaning the size of the rows returned - I know how to get the number of rows returned ).

Thanks so much for the pointers. I do love tweaking the Server.

I'm currently reading Joe Celko's SQL programming style as I've found too many fieldnames that I think should be reserved words but MySQL let's my programmers use! (like the word date). Joe has a LOT of info in a small book. Not sure if all of it is correct for MySQL. I think Joe comes from the cobol and JCL world where a lot of MySQL programmers are coming from the java and php world. Joe hates CamelHumps.

Do you all cap the first letter in a tablename?
SELECT somefield FROM Mytable; ???

I haven't been but will if that's proper style.....

thanks again everyone for the tips!

erin