Need help optimizing a mySQL query

[kh99]

That's a good question to look up on stackoverflow.com. There's one answer here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1...-by-rand-query. Basically, do a query (if you need to) to get the number of rows in the table, then do 5 queries with a random OFFSET. But you have 30 to get, so I guess you'd need to test to see if doing 30 separate queries will be faster that the one you have. Edit: oh, well, your query has some things it checks in the "WHERE', so I guess you'd have to be prepared to do more than 30 queries so that if the conditions for a given row aren't true you can get another. So maybe that's not really a good solution for you.

Also, unless you really need each page request to get a different 30 random rows, you could cache the results and only do the query once a minute, for example.