performance questions

Hi!
My company make several flash-based games, and I use php to communicate
with
mysql to provide highscore-lists.

My problem is this:
When I save a player's score in the mysql-table, I want to find which
place
the player got with his score (today). To get this I have tried two
different solutions, which both works, but are very ineffective: (The
Time-field is a DateTime type, and I have Score and Time as Indexes.
The Score-field is a DECIMAL (20,2))

1) SELECT COUNT(*) FROM table WHERE Score>=$score AND Time>CURDATE().
- or -
2) SELECT Score FROM table WHERE Score>=$score AND Time>CURDATE().

.... $place = mysql_num_rows($result)

Both give the right result, but the problem is that when there are many

players playing at the same time, and the table consists of several
million
records, the query is just too heavy for the mysql-server, and it
breakes
down.

So my question is: Are there any better ways of getting a player's
place?

Ole Johan, Norway

Re: performance questions

"ojorus" wrote in message
news:1154698142.589041.180610@p79g2000cwp.googlegroups.com.. .
> Hi!
> My company make several flash-based games, and I use php to communicate
> with
> mysql to provide highscore-lists.
>
> My problem is this:
> When I save a player's score in the mysql-table, I want to find which
> place
> the player got with his score (today). To get this I have tried two
> different solutions, which both works, but are very ineffective: (The
> Time-field is a DateTime type, and I have Score and Time as Indexes.
> The Score-field is a DECIMAL (20,2))
>
> 1) SELECT COUNT(*) FROM table WHERE Score>=$score AND Time>CURDATE().
> - or -
> 2) SELECT Score FROM table WHERE Score>=$score AND Time>CURDATE().
>
> ... $place = mysql_num_rows($result)
>
> Both give the right result, but the problem is that when there are many
>
> players playing at the same time, and the table consists of several
> million
> records, the query is just too heavy for the mysql-server, and it
> breakes
> down.
>
> So my question is: Are there any better ways of getting a player's
> place?
>
> Ole Johan, Norway
>

Unfortunately, both those solutions must search the entire db looking for
'Score >= $score'... you probably need to divide your db into smaller tables
of score ranges so that the queries don't take as long:

table names:

Scores_0thru100
Scores_101thru200
....

well, you get the idea. Then just place some PHP logic to
INSERT/UPDATE/SELECT the $score into/from the proper table.

Norm