django 1.1 creating high temporary tables with mysql 5.1

Question

Hi, we are using django 1.1/mysql5.1 for one of our projects. Seems like as the load on the webserver(apache/mod-wsgi) increases, the number of temporary tables created on mysql also increases, causing heavy alerts on our monitoring infrastructure. To give you an example, when the number of connected clients increases from 100 - 300, the number of temporary tables goes from 500-1000. The entire database has innodb tables. Here are a few things i would like to know:

1. Is it normal to have such heavy number of temporary tables?
2. What are the normal/optimal limits on the number of temporary tables that are allowed?
3. How to i minimize the number of temporary tables that django creates?

I know some of these are pretty vague, as the above questions depends on hardware,memory and other aspects of the DB machine and the webserver. But i am trying to get a sense of what is going on and what causes so many temporary tables to be created?

Thanks Venkat.

Answer 1

Django doesn't create any temporary tables by itself. It's all in the application that your colleagues have programmed.