UPDATE LOW_PRIORITY

TIP: If your UPDATEs on a read intensive environment are taking as much as 1800 seconds, and if you can afford it, try using UPDATE LOW_PRIORITY ..., it can help!

You can also restart MySQL server with --low-priority-updates to make all UPDATEs low priority.

Or, you can make your SELECTs HIGH_PRIORITY.

BTW, does any one know why my last post about MySQL performance tuning went missing on Planet MySQL?