Over Viewing the Interface - Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.4 for Effective MySQL Management - page 55

Improving fetch speed
Three configuration parameters have an effect on the speed of database name
retrieval and table counting. The first one is:
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['ShowDatabasesCommand'] = 'SHOW DATABASES';
Every time phpMyAdmin needs to obtain the list of databases from the server, it uses
the command listed in this parameter. The default command SHOW DATABASES is fine in
ordinary situations. However, on servers with many databases, speed improvements
can be observed by trying other commands such as one of the following:
SHOW DATABASES LIKE '#user#\_%'
SELECT DISTINCT TABLE_SCHEMA FROM information_schema.SCHEMA_
PRIVILEGES'
SELECT SCHEMA_NAME FROM information_schema.SCHEMATA
In the first example, #user# is replaced by the current username.
In extreme situations (thousands of databases), a user who installs his own copy of
phpMyAdmin should put false in this parameter. This would block any database
names' fetching, and would require to populate the $cfg['Servers'][$i]['only_
db'] parameter with this user's database list.
Finally, some users experience speed issues (at least under MySQL 5.1) with
information retrieval from INFORMATION_SCHEMA . Therefore, the $cfg['Servers']
[$i]['DisableIS'] directive, with its default value of TRUE , disables the usage of
INFORMATION_SCHEMA from a major portion of the phpMyAdmin code. For your
server, it may be worth setting this to FALSE to see if response time improves.
Main panel
The main panel is the principal working area, and all the possible views for it
are explained in the following sections. Its appearance can be customized. The
background color is defined in $cfg['MainBackground'] .