Question

I have a MySQL query that goes as follows

SELECT
    count(`clicks`.`user_id`) as total,
    `users`.`fullname`
FROM
    `users`,
    `clicks`,
WHERE
    `users`.`id` = `clicks`.`user_id`
GROUP BY
    `clicks`.`user_id`
ORDER BY
    `total` desc
LIMIT
    0,20;

I am running statistics on several button pressing type games. It has a user table and a clicks table. It logs clicks from a specific user. The user can click the button whenever they want. Twenty clicks one day, thirty another, etc. They aren’t all in a row.

Currently there are about ~180k clicks for ~2k users. This query takes 1.38 seconds to run on average. I would like to speed it up if that’s at all possible.

Answer 1

1. Is USERS.id defined as the primary key for the table? It should be…
2. Assuming INNODB, does CLICKS.user_id have a foreign key constraint on it to associate its values with USERS.id?
3. USERS.id and CLICKS.user_id are a numeric data type (IE: INT), not text based?
4. Indexes should be added (if they don’t already exist) for:
   • CLICKS.user_id
   • USERS.fullname

5. If indexes exist, have you tried refreshes the table statistics:

   ANALYZE TABLE USERS;
   ANALYZE TABLE CLICKS;