I have a rather small mysql DB in which I store an handful of pretty small images (320x480), it all behaved really well until recently, the table size is about 1.5Gb and there are about 34,000 records. At that point...

...All of a sudden the performance degradated by a factor of 100.

It looks like the DB has hit a rock hard limit and it can't cope with it anymore.

Anyone experienced anything like it?

(Please don't suggest to move the images off the DB on the filesystem, we have decided to do that with the next version of the software)