Re: Unusually high cpu usage

[Rick James]

Not SHOW STATUS, that only shows your current connection's status. Instead, do
SHOW GLOBAL STATUS
Also, please do
SHOW GLOBAL VARIABLES

> whopping number of connections

Yes, the numbers seem high. However, let's see the above things before I make a call on it.

> even a mildy complex query as one looking at entries withing a certain distance to a given point

That query is likely to require a "table scan". Let's see the SELECT and the table (SHOW CREATE TABLE). How many rows in that table? When I see the details, I can probably show you how to speed it up. Further discussion and a more complex (but efficient) solution is given in
http://mysql.rjweb.org/doc.php/latlng