If you are performing GROUP BY or ORDER BY operations on tables that are much larger than your available memory, you should increase the value of read_rnd_buffer_size to speed up the reading of rows following sorting operations.
You can make use of the example option files included with your MySQL distribution; see Section 5.1.2, “Server Configuration Defaults”.
If you specify an option on the command line for mysqld or mysqld_safe, it remains in effect only for that invocation of the server. To use the option every time the server runs, put it in an option file.
To see the effects of a parameter change, do something like this: