Drupal SQL performance is bad - any SQL experts? :(

HI there,

Been running a new drupal site for about 3 months. Frankly, the site runs poorly. It's very slow, and oftentimes we get cannot connect to database errors. After awhile this goes away, but the performance still stinks. It's aggravating especially in light of this is a fairly small site (some 100 articles and a few podcasts) that gets relatively few visitors (30-40 per day).

I had hoped Drupal would be easier on the maintenance that it has been, and I'm starting to regret choosing it. However, maybe I just need to tune some things that are not in the general instructions.

Right now, the status report on the site comes back all green and good. Caching mode had been disabled (we had some problems with it) but I have now turned it on to see what it will do. We called MediaTemple about this, thinking at first it was their servers (it doesn't appear to be) and they had me run a status report on the DB - and we got back all sorts of problems - namely these:

http://www.pixelmech.com/rev2/sqlproblems.gif

Some of these seem really bad. I have no idea how to fix them. The guy stated you could go into a table and optimize it, but how do I know what table? Secondly, that sounds a bit risky not knowing what I'm doing. He seems to think re-indexing things would help, but again, no idea how to do that.

If there is anyone who can help me solve some of these issues it would be greatly appreciated. I know basic SQL and basic DB stuff, but I don't know how to fix these errors, and frankly, I didn't think we were going to have to deal with these types of issue with drupal in the first place.

Thanks

Tom