Mysql Hogging all system resources

[Don O'Neil]

I have a customer that loaded up a HUGE table and was doing all sorts of
fancy stuff in it, and not waiting for the process to finish before sending
the same query, and eventually loading up the server to the point where the
only thing I could do was unplug it.

Is there a way to prioritize or set the amount of resources that MySQL is
allowed to have? Do I need to set it up as a jailed process maybe? I've
never done that before, so I'm not sure if it's the right approach or not.

I'm running FreeBSD 6.1.