Server load warning – maybe due to Podpress?

I received an unexpected email from my hosting company which told me they’d put an limit of max_connections = 1 on the MySQL database in order to cease a very high load on the server.

They say: “Practically this limit does not allow any MySQL operations for your DB user ‘wordpress’.

“Our system engineers investigated the reasons for the high load and they discovered that it was caused by the extremely heavy MySQL operations performed by exec-comms.com. Here are the queries we detected at the time of the high server load:

| 5874699 | wordpress | localhost | wordpress | Query | 42 | Copying to tmp
table | SELECT * FROM wp_bas_visitors, wp_bas_refer, wp_bas_ua, wp_bas_os WHERE referer = referer_id AND osy |

There then follows 17 nearly identical lines, concluding:

“Here is a sample of the detected slow queries:

User: wordpress

Host: localhost

db: wordpress

Command: Query

Time: 2

State: Copying to tmp table

Info: SELECT * FROM wp_bas_visitors, wp_bas_refer, wp_bas_ua, wp_bas_os WHERE referer = referer_id AND osystem = os_id AND useragent = ua_id AND lasthere >
DATE_SUB(NOW(), INTERVAL 20 MINUTE) AND visit_ip = -909709501 AND ua_string =
'iTunes/7.3.1 (Windows; N)' ORDER BY lasthere DESC LIMIT 1

I’m assuming the reference to iTunes might be a podcast related issue? I run Podpress and have created approx eith 5min long podcasts.

Has anyone experience with this?

Any suggestions?

Ian