The "innocuous change" was to add an index for "is_robot" which is true for 6 out of 20,000 records and null for the rest.
My complaint/question/observation is not how to optimize the query that went awry, but to be alarmed that a venerable and perfectly serviceable query, written years ago and ignored ever since, suddenly brought the system crashing down after making a seemingly innocuous change intended to make a marginal improvement on an unrelated query. I had previously believed that tinkering the schema by adding indexes was a safe activity. It's as though I add a shortcut to my regular commute and caused a massive traffic jam when the entire traffic flow tried to follow me. (Both tables are "ok" according to analyze table) -- MySQL General Mailing List For list archives: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql To unsubscribe: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql?unsub=arch...@jab.org