The real problem that you're running into (been there, done that) is that the MyISAM index code is only 32-bit clean. You can try to use more than 4GB for the key_buffer, but it won't work; I don't recall if the code implicitly limits the value, or just falls over.
One possible workaround is to use multiple (alternate) key_buffers if your schema is such that that makes sense. You will want to spend some time looking at the statistics to understand just where you're running out of memory - if the "pressure" is on the index or the tables themselves (or both). As Dan said, MyISAM tries to get the system to do caching of the table data. That works reasonably well on Linux and NetBSD (at least), but joins and sorts will be slow above a certain size, and there seems to be nothing that can be done about it. Good luck. Best, chris -- MySQL General Mailing List For list archives: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql To unsubscribe: http://lists.mysql.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
