I have web sites where there are periodic inserts (& deletes ) of many new records generated by crawlers.
In order to reduce the # of queries I do compound operations like INSERT VALUES(a),(b),(c), and DELETE FROM table WHERE record_id IN ($LONG_ID_LIST). At the same as these operations are occurring users are doing queries on these tables. I've noticed that during these long compound operations SELECT queries seem to be slow as if the tables are read locked. Does this sound like what is happening ? If so to prevent tables from being locked should I : a) return to single INSERT and DELETE operations & suffer the query overhead for each single operation ? or b) if I do INSERT and DELETE with LOW_PRIORITY with a compound operation does that mean that tables won't get locked ? Will that result in INSERTs or DELETEs being spread over time such that SELECTs could potentially get different counts over that spread of time ? or c) something else ?
