Horrible MySql performance?

[Patrick Hogan]

I'm hoping I'm just missing something but I can't seem to figure out how to speed up my "small" MySQL database. It only has 1 table but 6 million rows. I am doing a stock history database. I put an index on it but it's crazy slow to query. My "quotes" table has 7 columns (symbol, date_end, open, high, low, ajdclose, volume). Date is a date field and the rest are varchar. Select count(*) from quotes; 6,034,154 records took 16:33 minutes That seems really slow even though there are tons of rows. I have a primary index on both the date_end and the Symbol column so that i only have a single row for any symbol/date. I see 3 indexes (date_end primary, symbol is primary and "symbol_index" is the one i made for both columns.) I only created 1 so not sure where the others came from. I am hoping there is some easy index or something I can create to get my queries to be faster. Any ideas? I can give more details if needed.