I installed iostat and used it. It showed that my MySQL data is striped over four devices. During my "idle" query each of those four devices has about 25% utilization, which is consistent with the hypothesis that this I/O is the bottleneck. It looks like case closed. I am looking into better server&disk and rewriting my query along the lines you suggested.
Thanks! Mike Spreitzer SMTP: mspre...@us.ibm.com, Lotus Notes: Mike Spreitzer/Watson/IBM Office phone: +1-914-784-6424 (IBM T/L 863-) AOL Instant Messaging: M1k3Sprtzr
