Is my hardware slow or is it MySQL performance?

[mike wylie]

I'm trying to fend off my project being ported from mysql to oracle, as a timely and unnecessary task. However people are blindly saying it will be much faster in oracle.

I am getting quite slow query responses from my database, I'm uncertain whether it's my hardware or my config.

I'm using MySQL 4.0.18. My hardware setup is:
IBM X.360
8 x 1.5GHz Xeon CPUs with 256k cache
4Gb Memory
IBM RAID 5 subsystem (+separate system disk).

Running Linux.

I am basically using the MySQL huge config with slight tweaks.

My table is taking about 4.5 mins to do a full table scan query, for example doing a
select count(*) or a select count(*) where id > 0. Admitedly I hardly do any queries that do a full scan, but the performance is poor. My oracle counterpart claims to do the same type of query on a greater amount of data in less than 3 seconds.

My system works in a way where we do one large load, then make the data live for a few, read only connections

Could anybody withe more experience tell me whether my query is, very roughly, as expected or whether I mave have problems?

The structure of my table is:
CREATE TABLE `cpath` (
`ID` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
`NAME` varchar(255) NOT NULL default '',
`DESC` varchar(255) default NULL,
`TYPE` varchar(255) NOT NULL default '',
`SPEC_TYPE` varchar(255) default NULL,
`NCBI_TAX_ID` int(11) NOT NULL default '-9999',
`XML_CONTENT` longtext NOT NULL,
`CREATE_TIME` timestamp(14) NOT NULL,
`UPDATE_TIME` timestamp(14) NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`CPATH_ID`)
) TYPE=MyISAM MAX_ROWS=100000000 AVG_ROW_LENGTH=1927 COMMENT='Contains Entities.' AUTO_INCREMENT=1 ;

I can supply my database variables if needed.

Many thanks