Kevin,
The Mysql documentation suggests you use no more than 75% or 80% of
physical memory to allocate for key_buffer. As Heikki and Jeremy
confirmed for me this week, sort_buffer and record_buffer are the ones
that grow per thread - Heikki suggested 1Mb for each of those. Using
swap as RAM (
If you only have 2GB of RAM and you are allocating 5120M (=5GB) for the
key_buffer, you have a problem. That should make your system swap like
mad and everything slow to a crawl. Also, note that some of these config
options may effect per-thread allocation. I don't know which ones off the
