Is it correct the we are now using the locking
mechanism in MySQL? (I
haven't been following this list for a while.) If so then this is probably
causing all the delays. Was there is specific reason for starting to use
locking?
No. We switched to the InnoDB table type, which uses row-level locking
instead of MyISAM's table locking. So in general, things should get much
faster.
Regards,
Erik