As a look into /var/lib/mysql/adele-slow.log shows, the AV_TEXT table is in the center of a lot of performance problems we're seeing here on antville.org. Looking for a fix I stumbled across PROCEDURE ANALYSE(), which is a very nice MySQL feature that tells you how database columns are currently utilized and what type definition MySQL would propose for those columns. The statement

SELECT * FROM AV_TEXT PROCEDURE ANALYSE(16,256)

produces a few interesting results:

I've tried them these out on my local installation and they seem to work fine, so I'm checking them into CVS and will eventually update the DB on antville.org