Dissecting a database again the joys of trying to work out what talks to what.

We had a problem recently with slow connections to a MySQL 5 database on linux. The symptoms were that for the first connection from the client (cfmx /bluedragon/query tool) the response from the MySQL server would be very slow up to 15secs. Then after that the reponse was quick (This was actually a bit random under load with connection pooling).