Just a note from the poor sod who's databases were being brutalized by 
this behavior.

We found several long-lived clients that were '<IDLE> in transaction'; 
fixing the offending code (a perl web application that stupidly held 
its connections open, AutoCommit off; and a daemon that was hanging, 
and thus failing to close its connection) and restarting said processes 
has reduced our load from ~2.5 at peak to ~0.6.  The sl_log_1 table 
went from ~720,000 rows to under 5000, which my gut says is correct, 
given our transaction volume.

A hearty thanks to Josh, Christoper, Jan, and everybody else who helped 
us out.

Best,
jfb
-- 
James Felix Black
Programmer, iParadigms LLC
(510) 287-9720 x 250