[Wikipedia-l] Using database queries

[Brion VIBBER]

Tim Marklew wrote:
> LDC - could you comment on how potentially dangerous this function is in 
> terms of slowing down the site for others?  If a query results in a big 
> table, this can slow down the server.  Is there an upper limit for how 
> long a query can take, or the size of a table, before it would time 
> out?  If so, how big is the limit?

Umm, not that I know of. I believe there's a timeout on PHP scripts, but 
I'm not sure if that affects long queries on the database, which run in 
a separate process.

On that note; currently the MySQL server is running at 99.5% CPU. 
Whatever it's doing, it's slowing the wiki to a trickle; I can't even 
get a connection through.

I note in the web server logs a POST request to the SQL-query page at 
about 7:26 pm (server time, which is slight slow from PDT); from that 
point on most web requests are logged with a size of "-", which means 
that something croaked and no bytes were sent.

The IP address on this query looks suspiciously like yours, Tim! Exactly 
what query did you run?

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)