The ones having the most trouble recently are those run off of the phpbb database. Those are the ones I'm finding are ending up hanging the system. and when I say hanging, it's really just one databse. All other sites and actions on other databses run fine. It's just the one. And recently (the last three weeks) it's only been the phpBB database.

The website has thousands of messages in it. The site is www.redmen.com and there are tons of posts. He's got archives back to 1997.

The queries in question are update queries to the threads read count I think. And the one on the first page that gets the last 5 posts. Now, when the server is running fine (say when it's first (re)started or after running FLUSH TABLES, those queries take less than 0.2 seconds to execute. So, they would hardly be considered slow queries. When the problem manifests itself (and I believe it is that the server deteriorates over time) the query times get long and longer until they finally start hanging.

I don't know what OLAP or OLTP are. I know that I'm using primarily PHP to connect to the server using mysql_connect() from the web server that is a different physical machine. It connects over a gigabit Ethernet connection.

Perhaps, like I said, I should run "FLUSH TABLES" every few hours just to keep the machine running. I thought I read there was a way to have the system do this automatically am I right? Will flush tables cause internet connections to drop and time-out people on the websites?

I know enough to be dangerous. Thanks for being patient!