How to prioritise certain queries in MySQL?

Question

I have a large number of background reads and writes, and a much smaller number of user reads, of a highly contended MySQL database - is there any way to flag certain queries (the user queries) as being high priority so that they take preference over background queries? I want user responsiveness to be high, but don't really care about the background queries.

Thanks

Answer 1

MySQl supports insert delayed for delayed inserts and low_priority for updates. And for your user reads, there's the high_priority extension on select. If you're using the MyISAM storage engine, there's the related (but different) concurrent inserts feature.