[ashray]

Appears that he has 188590 rows. It definitely sounds like a configuration issue. Maybe the mysql table cache might be bogged down or the query cache is full or malfunctioning. Could be a lot of things.

Sorting that into a temp table, and caching that in memory would be really fast on a server with reasonable RAM and proper indexes.

[jacques_chester]

InnoDB helps a lot. MyISAM likes to perform joins on disk if a table has a TEXT field ... even if you're not using that field in your query.