MySQL Server and Clients

which is which?

[txbakers]

I've always wondered, now that I've been installing and running mySQL for years, which is the server and which is the client?

I don't know about any client piece, just the server piece. What is the client?

[freeflight2]

server: a process/daemon named 'mysqld' usually listening on port 3028 for requests (the "Database" server) and answering them

clients: programs linked with libmysqlclient.so communicating with mysql servers - such as:
- the 'mysql' program
- php with mysql extensions
- ODBC drivers (which in turn might act as a "server" for ODBC clients)
- other mysql tools such as mysqldump, mysqladmin
- perl's DBI::mysql
- etc...

[txbakers]

so if I get an error "the mySQL client has run out of memory" which client might that refer to?

I can't believe it's eaten up the gig of RAM from one query. Might it still be a memory leak somewhere?

[rocknbil]

WOW!

Can you post the query?

Maybe it's looping somehow, or is not correctly restricting the results on a multi-table join.

[txbakers]

The trouble is I don't know WHAT exactly is causing the error. There are thousands and thousands of queries being run every day on the server. the only thing I know that really stops this from happening is to flush the Key Buffer every so often.

I have to do this with a batch file/command line, since I can't find the proper code to do it anywhere else.

Doing that has helped stop the problem but it's very frustrating.