Locking Issue?

[Terry Riley]

Can someone help, please?

We set up a server to handle a coldfusion web application (CFMX 6.1) 
running against MySQL 4.1.3b-beta on WinNT.

When it is a little stretched, we are finding many instances of queries 
listed as either 'Sending...' or 'Copying...' in the processlist, with 
the time going ever upwards (last check was at 1000 seconds and rising). 
All the tables in the database concerned are InnoDB, and none of the 
queries concerned are, as far as I know, involved in any transaction - 
they are straight selects (albeit complex ones, perhaps).

When this happens, the other requests to the server are inevitably slow, 
and these seem never to be cleared unless I kill the threads - and I'm not 
100% sure how much damage I'm doing in that action.

Is this a possible locking issue? If so, how do I get around it. The 
settings for the server are at default, except where noted.

This is the my.ini file:

[mysqld]

max_connections=1000

basedir=e:/mysql
datadir=e:/mysql/data

wait_timeout=60

# TR added next 6 lines on 27/07/04, after instal of v4.1.3b
old-passwords
local-infile
query_cache_size=25M
query_cache_type=1
set-variable=max_allowed_packet=16M
set-variable=key_buffer=8M

log-bin=
log_slow_queries=


[mysql]
local-infile=1


Any pointers as to what I may be doing wrong? Please?

Yes, I know we should upgrade to 4.1.7, and we will - soon.

Cheers
Terry Riley