MySQL table creation insanely slow
I would turn on profiling to get an idea of what takes so long. An example using mysql's CLI:

SET profiling = 1;
CREATE TABLE blah (id BIGINT UNSIGNED NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY);
SET profiling = 1;


You should get a response something like this:

mysql&gt; SHOW PROFILES;
| Query_ID | Duration   | Query |
+----------+------------+-------------------------------------------------------------+
|        1 | 0.00913800 | CREATE TABLE blah (id BIGINT UNSIGNED NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY) |
+----------+------------+-------------------------------------------------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

mysql&gt; SHOW PROFILE FOR QUERY 1;
+----------------------+----------+
| Status               | Duration |
+----------------------+----------+
| starting             | 0.000071 |
| checking permissions | 0.000007 |
| Opening tables       | 0.001698 |
| System lock          | 0.000043 |
| creating table       | 0.007260 |
| After create         | 0.000004 |
| query end            | 0.000004 |
| closing tables       | 0.000015 |
| freeing items        | 0.000031 |
| logging slow query   | 0.000002 |
| cleaning up          | 0.000003 |
+----------------------+----------+
11 rows in set (0.00 sec)