I'm using Amarok 1.4.6 with MySQL 5.0.42 under Gentoo. My collection contains ~8k songs. On every track change, mysqld and amarokapp hog the CPU for about 4 seconds. It seems to alternate - one second high mysqld usage, one second high amarokapp usage, one second high mysqld usage, then one second high amarokapp usage. This happens after the track change - the music plays smoothly, but just as the new song is starting to play the system slows down for a few seconds. This happens both on manual track change and automatic track change.

While this would normally be harmless, it's a pain when you're running games such as armagetronad. The game pauses for those 4 seconds, and when it recovers you're usually nice and dead (it can be a very fast game). It also affects video playback, and basically anything where a 4 second stall is noticeable.

Is this normal behavior? Would using SQLite help? I've tried running mysqld niced, but it doesn't help much.

I have the mysql db running on a differnt machine. mysqld has the same symptoms you described, but the amarok app is just normal.