[TriLUG] MySQL acting funny

[Brian Bell]

MySQL is seemingly choking on requests made thru the browser (with PHP 
scripts).   It seems like things have slowed down by about a factor of 
10.  haven't had any failures that I know of - but the site and the app 
are just crawling with no apparent reason.

Command line MySQL requests and queries seem to be working fine and fast.

Server is 99% idle.  
/dev/md0 --> mounted as /var = 67% free space (RAID 5 in good shape via 
/proc/mdstat )
but it is taking an inordinate amount of time to make any request on any 
table through web pages (phpMyAdmin, my apps, etc)
I do not detect a major spike in CPU or MEM when I'm watching top and 
creating db activity on the web site.

anybody got any ideas? 

FYI - i'm running the following setup
CentOS release 4.0 (Final)
Apache/2.0.52
MySQL 4.1.7
PHP 4.3.9

TIA,
Brian