How to improve Limit clause in MySQL - mysql

Question

I have the posts table with 10k rows and I want to create pagination by that. So I have the next query for that purpose:
SELECT post_id
FROM posts
LIMIT 0, 10;
When I Explain that query I get the next result:
So I don't understand why MySql need to iterate thru 9976 rows for finding the 10 first rows? I will be very thankful if somebody help me to optimize this query.
Also I know about that topic MySQL ORDER BY / LIMIT performance: late row lookups, but the problem still exist even if I modify the query to the next one:
SELECT t.post_id
FROM (
SELECT post_id
FROM posts
ORDER BY
post_id
LIMIT 0, 10
) q
JOIN posts t
ON q.post_id = t.post_id
Update
#pala_'s solution works great for above simple case but now while I am testing a more complex query with inner join. My purpose is to join comment table with post table and unfortunately when I Explain new query is still iterate through 9976 rows.
Select comm.comment_id
from comments as comm
inner join (
SELECT post_id
FROM posts
ORDER BY post_id
LIMIT 0, 10
) as paged_post on comm.post_id = paged_post.post_id;
Do you have some idea what is the reason of such MySQL behavior ?

Answer 1

Try this:
SELECT post_id
FROM posts
ORDER BY post_id DESC
LIMIT 0, 10;
Pagination via LIMIT doesn't make much sense without ordering anyway, and it should fix your problem.
mysql> explain select * from foo;
+----+-------------+-------+-------+---------------+---------+---------+------+------+-------------+
| id | select_type | table | type | possible_keys | key | key_len | ref | rows | Extra |
+----+-------------+-------+-------+---------------+---------+---------+------+------+-------------+
| 1 | SIMPLE | foo | index | NULL | PRIMARY | 4 | NULL | 20 | Using index |
+----+-------------+-------+-------+---------------+---------+---------+------+------+-------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)
mysql> explain select * from foo limit 0, 10;
+----+-------------+-------+-------+---------------+---------+---------+------+------+-------------+
| id | select_type | table | type | possible_keys | key | key_len | ref | rows | Extra |
+----+-------------+-------+-------+---------------+---------+---------+------+------+-------------+
| 1 | SIMPLE | foo | index | NULL | PRIMARY | 4 | NULL | 20 | Using index |
+----+-------------+-------+-------+---------------+---------+---------+------+------+-------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)
mysql> explain select * from foo order by id desc limit 0, 10;
+----+-------------+-------+-------+---------------+---------+---------+------+------+-------------+
| id | select_type | table | type | possible_keys | key | key_len | ref | rows | Extra |
+----+-------------+-------+-------+---------------+---------+---------+------+------+-------------+
| 1 | SIMPLE | foo | index | NULL | PRIMARY | 4 | NULL | 10 | Using index |
+----+-------------+-------+-------+---------------+---------+---------+------+------+-------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)
Regarding your last comments about the comment join. Do you have an index on comment(post_id)? with my test data I'm getting the following results:
mysql> alter table comments add index pi (post_id);
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.15 sec)
Records: 0 Duplicates: 0 Warnings: 0
mysql> explain select c.id from comments c inner join (select id from posts o order by id limit 0, 10) p on c.post_id = p.id;
+----+-------------+------------+-------+---------------+---------+---------+------+------+--------------------------+
| id | select_type | table | type | possible_keys | key | key_len | ref | rows | Extra |
+----+-------------+------------+-------+---------------+---------+---------+------+------+--------------------------+
| 1 | PRIMARY | <derived2> | ALL | NULL | NULL | NULL | NULL | 10 | |
| 1 | PRIMARY | c | ref | pi | pi | 5 | p.id | 4 | Using where; Using index |
| 2 | DERIVED | o | index | NULL | PRIMARY | 4 | NULL | 10 | Using index |
+----+-------------+------------+-------+---------------+---------+---------+------+------+--------------------------+
and for table size reference:
mysql> select count(*) from posts;
+----------+
| count(*) |
+----------+
| 15021 |
+----------+
1 row in set (0.01 sec)
mysql> select count(*) from comments;
+----------+
| count(*) |
+----------+
| 1000 |
+----------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)