I normally keep an eye on table overhead in my MySql database. But two days ago my site began to really slow down to a crawl. I have a VPS which normally flies along but I couldn't even log into my Plesk cp at times it was so bad.

After looking at the tables in Phpmyadmin I noticed quite a few had some overhead ranging from only a few bytes to a thousand plus.

After 'optimising' them the server is back up to full speed. Would table overhead cause Apache to slow right down and stall at times?