What are the potential causes for a sudden MySQL slowdown?

A few days ago mysql became suddenly very slow with queries taking more than 10s to complete when they used to complete under 100ms... It lasted about an hour and then the speed was normal again. What could cause such a problem?

A few more information: The mysql version is 5.0.51a The mysql database is on a dedicated box with 1.5 GB ram. There was no swap being used when the mysql server was slow.

Here's the mysqlreport from the database http://pastebin.com/au6yMWqQ None of the caches are full..

I've noticed that the DNS server used by the server for resolving hostname was a bit slow sometimes lately. Could this have an impact?

Thanks,
I've crossposted this on serverfault, hope it's ok...

EDIT: Could I try to have a master master replication on ec2 to protect against the problem happening again? Half of the instances connecting to the mysql database are on ec2 (the rest directly from layeredtech)

You could try the following to improve things

skip-host-cache and skip-name-resolve

Please follow these steps:

Step 01) Add the following to /etc/my.cnf

[mysqld]
skip-host-cache
skip-name-resolve

Step 02) service mysql restart

Step 03) Stop using mysql users that have DNS names. Run thus query:

SELECT user,host FROM mysql.user;

Any user that has a DNS name, simply replace it with IP Address (such as 10.85.115.73) or a netblock (such as 10.85.115.%)

You may also want to run this command intermittently (say one an hour in a crontab)

FLUSH HOSTS;

Give it a Try !!!

StackExchange Database Administrators Q#7120, answer score: 3