Thanks Hank. I'll try to split up the query into 2 separate queries. I think
that the reason the original query is so slow is that I don't have enough RAM
allocated to mysql. When the original query takes place, I see a process
"Copying to tmp table on disk". I believe it's writing all the data to the
disk and then sorting it. I'd like to try tweaking the my.cnf file to allow
mysql to use more RAM. I just need someone to help me edit the file because
I'm not quite sure what I'm doing...

Thanks, Grant

Hank <hes...@gmail.com> wrote: > Now that I know what's causing the slow
queries, what can I do to fix it?

The only thing I can suggest is breaking up the query into two parts - the first part to retrieve just the product codes and salesrank, and sort and limit that.. save in a temp table or use application code to retrieve and print the rest of the product info. Sorting 300,000+ records in that huge result set is going to take some time (although it shouldn't take 10 minutes).

-Hank