I'm in debate with my database admin. He claims that my queries I'm sending through PHP are the problem and he is stating several things I believe are completely false.
To begin I have a site receiving 64,000 daily views. My server monitors queries over 5 seconds. Multiple times during the day I see 3-6 "SELECT" queries all taking more than 10 seconds, sometimes even up to 200 seconds. This is on an InnoDB table on MySQL 5.0. Also PHP is calculating the speed of the query using microtime. Ironically enough I try the same queries in PHPMyAdmin and they take 0.0031 seconds.
My Admin says I shouldn't use an asterisk in my code, but nowhere online goes against that. He says I should convert all my tables from MyISAM to InnoDB. I have already done that but still the same things happen. He doesn't seem to be budging and even worse once in a while my server is down for 1-2 minutes with a MySQL error of "Too Many Connections" or "MySQL Server has gone away"
The Admin isn't listening to reason and these problems continue. I'm on a version of mysql with profiling disabled so I can't really see query times of just mysql. Can anyone suggest anything I can do or try to diagnose this? I'm only the coder but I have experience in mysql (probably more than the admin).