Why would it make such a difference to move mysqld to anothermachine?

[John Almberg]

> Yes, that could be the case if the database was transferred by  
> doing mysqldump
> on the first machine and then loading the dump on the second.

This is indeed what I did.

Odd that you ask this question, because my very first guess about  
this issue was that the database was corrupted in some way. However,  
I could not find any evidence of corruption, per se.

I didn't realize that mysql records could become 'fragmented'... I  
guess this means the records are fragmented on disk as the database  
file is updated over time.

The records in question (mainly product data) are not changed very  
often, and had been moved (using mysqldump) to this new machine in  
the last 6 weeks or so. So this doesn't sound like a likely cause.  
However, a very interesting thing to know...

-- John