[TYPO3-english] Site Slowdown - MySQL Query - Possible TT-News Related Question

[Louis Coppola]

Hello Everyone,

Recently we have been experiencing a great slowdown and a long pause
to generate the pages of our typo3 site.  The site has many tt_news
items (we are talking over 150,000 easy) and has many categories etc.
We recently were trying to do some upgrades to php on the server and
had some problems which caused us to roll everything back to the
original setup.

After rolling everything back we have been getting extremely slow load
and page generation times.  I traced this delay down to a specific
MySQL query which is taking a lot of time to complete.

The query that continues to hang repeatedly is this:

SELECT group_concat( cast(pid as char)) as pids FROM tt_content WHERE
list_type=9 and hidden=0

Can anyone tell me what this query is doing, and what could be causing
it to hang in this way?  I am attempting to track and diagnose the
problem further but I am running into a wall trying to determine where
this is coming from.

Is there anyway/extension that I can use to see which extension or
function in my system is causing this query to be executed?

Does anyone have any info on what this is doing?  What it is involved
with?  And how I may be able to either troubleshoot further to
identify the culprit, or any changes that I could make to attempt a
fix?

Thanks ahead of time for any help.  Desperate and looking for answers,

Louis Coppola