I have a single myisam table with 5Million entries. My updates/inserts are very occasional, but volume of reads is to large. My application has 20 threads connected to MySQL. What i want to know is whether MYISAM will support concurrent reads to happen, i.e. can all 20 threads perform read operation on the MySQL considering it has table level locking.
If not, would you recommend me to use InnoDB for this read-intense application.
Any input on this is immensely appreciated.
Inserts, updates and table structure changes require an exclusive lock on the table (no one else can read or write). So you can have multiple simultaneous readers or a single writer at any given time.
To further vgatto’s comment, that means when an insert/update/delete needs to occur, any follow select query will queue up behind the write operation.
So MyISAM can do many parallel reads, except when a write is occuring, where all reads stop.