myisampack running really slow for large DBs I was going through compressing a bunch of archival myisam tables using myisampack

It was making decent progress until it got to the most recent tables.  The overall database is a set of archives for a single production table.  Each archive version represents 1 quarter of a year going back several years.

Nothing has drastically changed in the data being stored or the average row length.  The individual archives have been growing with time as there simply are more on more rows each quarter over the previous one.

Up until the most recent 4 quarters the rate of compressing/rebuilding the index (which is only a single int PK) was around 14-16k rows/seconds.

The last ones were crawling along only doing about 1k rows/second.  Even right from the start; it wasn't like it started of as fast as the others and then suddenly slowed down after getting so far into it.

There wasn't any spike in general system load or i/o contention from other processes when it started slowing down.

Has anyone experienced this?  Is there something myisampack where it's overall rate of progress it should be expected to tank when compressing a table over a certain size?

Edit:  Since these are myisam tables I should point out they are all in the same datadir and all stored on the same physical array.
If you have any TEXT/BLOB fields in your MyISAM tables, you may just have bloated fields.

You verify this, go back to your older MyISAM tables and perform this:

SELECT LENGTH(TextOrBLOBField) FROM some_table;


Run this same query against more recent tables and see if the slowness is just O(n) (order n) running time based on the amount of recorded data.