Intersection of two (very) big tables - mysql

Question

I have two tables: all_users and vip_users
all_users table has a list of all users (you don't say?) in my system and it currently has around 57k records, while vip_users table has around 37k records.
Primary key in both tables is an autoincrement id field. all_users table is big in terms of attribute count (around 20, one of them is email), while vip_users table has only (along with id) email attribute.
I wanted to query out the "nonVip" users by doing this (with help of this question here on SO):
SELECT all_users.id, all_users.email
FROM all_users
LEFT OUTER JOIN vip_users
ON (all_users.email=vip_users.email)
WHERE vip_users.email IS NULL
And now, finally coming to the problem - I ran this query in phpmyadmin and even after 20 minutes I was forced to close it and restart httpd service as it was taking too long to complete, my server load jumped over 2 and the site (which also queries the database) became useless as it was just loading too slow. So, my question is - how do I make this query? Do I make some script and run it over night - not using phpmyadmin (is this maybe where the problem lies?), or do I need to use different SQL query?
Please help with your thoughts on this.

Answer 1

Try indexing the fields email on both tables, that should speed up the query
CREATE INDEX useremail ON all_users(email)
CREATE INDEX vipemail ON vip_users(email)

Answer 2

As written, you're not getting the results you're looking for. You're looking for vip_users rows where the email matches an email in users, and is also NULL.
Is there a reason you want vip_users to have a separate id from users? If you change the vip_users id field to a fk on the users id field, yo would then change your select to:
SELECT all_users.id, all_users.email
FROM all_users
LEFT OUTER JOIN vip_users
ON (all_users.id=vip_users.id)
WHERE vip_users.email IS NULL;
There's no reason this query should take any discernible about of time. 37k records is not a very big table....

Answer 3

I think NOT IN is faster and used less resource than LEFT OUTER JOIN.
Can you try -
SELECT *
FROM all_users
WHERE id NOT IN (SELECT id
FROM vip_users
WHERE email IS NULL);