MySQL question for vBulletin speed improvements.

[UserName]

I want to get some opinions on this.

A developer we work with has suggested that vBulletin speed could possibly be improved by splitting some of the existing tables (user, for example) up into two smaller tables, one with fixed-length fields and the other with the text strings. His theory is that MySQL is very fast with fixed length tables and so splitting them up might help the performance of the database.

I am not a MySQL expert, so I want to know if this idea makes any sense and if it might help to speed up some of the locking problems that some of the higher traffic sites are seeing lately?

Any comments?

[Chris Schreiber]

This idea has actually been considered (not specifically for the user table, but for the post table)... and having two tables, one fixed and the other with variable length fields would help performance wise. However, I don't think it will help with locking issues, since you will still be updating the tables as often with the same number of users.

[UserName]

Thanks Chris!

I think his theory on it possibly helping the locking problem had to do with the idea of trying to speed up the time that some of the slower queries take. If you could speed them up via table splitting, then maybe it would help the table to unlock quicker and bring down the backlog of queries.

As I said, I'm no expert, which is why I really appreciate your opinion and the opinions of others here on vB. :)