Newbie question: difference between MySQL shipped w/ Linux distro and downloading from mysql.com

Hi folks. I've got MySQL running on a W2K dev box and want to run it on a production Linux box. Being new to Linux, I'm wondering what's the difference between the version of MySQL that ships with a Linux distro and downloading it from the MySQL website. By way of example: The SuSE website

MySQL SMP performance question

Hi everyone. I've got a web app that I'm getting ready to make public and I'm to figure out how well MySQL will utilize multiple processors. Has anyone seen how MySQL would scale from 1 to 8 processors? Is it even remotely close to linear? My dev environment is W2K, but production will run Red

inconsistent query times for same query

Hi everyone. I'm using MySQL 4.0.16 with W2K/SP4 on a 512KB RAM/1.2GHz Athlon machine (my dev workstation). I'm having a strange problem: when I execute a query via the MySQL Control Center, it takes 10 seconds to return. About three seconds into the query, I issue a mysqladmin processlist and see

Re: inconsistent query times for same query

Thanks Joseph. I just to another look at the query and it actually takes 65 seconds on the first run, not 10 seconds, so this is important for me to understand. So my next questions are: Is there any way to tune the OS file system cache? Is there any way to flush it or examine what's in it?