Re: Explain shows different results on two servers

[Rick James]

The likely answers:
* The constants in the queries are different
* The amount of data in the tables is different
* The cache on one machine happens to be 'better' populated at the moment
* Need for ANALYZE (which you are doing)
* You are using InnoDB, which collects 'statistics' in an inconsistent way
* etc, etc

I have seen as many as 6 different EXPLAIN plans on a single machine, taken consecutively. (This is best explained by the first and third bullet items.)

These is vital to digging further, please provide them:
* SHOW CREATE TABLE tbl\G -- engine, indexes (for each table)
* SHOW TABLE STATUS LIKE 'tbl'\G -- sizes (for each table)
* SHOW VARIABLES LIKE '%buffer%'; -- cache size
and surround them with [ code ] and [ / code ]

Ouch. I see you are doing a difficult problem -- latitude/longitude, and finding "nearest".