Erik Moeller wrote:
Merging the tables is
certainly undesirable as this would substantially slow things down (the
OLD table of the English wiki is currently 8801714176 bytes and dog slow).
Are you sure the size makes it slow? The way I understand it, it
doesn't; if you split it up into several tables, it'll still have to
organise those different tables. Either way, a row look-up will be O(n)
without an index and O(log n) with an index.
What makes a database slow is the number of reads and writes it has to
perform (mainly the writes because they block the reads).
So, if my perception of this all is correct, the best way to optimise
things is to use efficient queries (trying to minimise writes,
especially on the most heavily read-from tables) and things like
MemCacheD (which heavily reduces the number of reads), and not to split
things up into several tables.
Greetings,
Timwi