MySQL has two confusingly identical by the first look variables myisam_sort_buffer_size and sort_buffer_size. Thing is that those two confusingly similar variables has absolutely different meanings.
sort_buffer_size is a per-connection variable and do not belongs to any specific storage engine. It doesn’t matter do you use MyISAM or InnoDB – MySQL will allocate sort_buffer_size for every sort (required most of the times for ORDER BY and GROUP BY queries) so increasing it’s value might help speeding up those queries however I would not recommend to change it from the default value unless you are absolutely sure about all the drawbacks. Value for out-of-the-box MySQL-5.1.41 installation on Ubuntu is 2Mb and it’s recommended to keep it that way.
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