Possible Duplicate:
MySQL: Alternatives to ORDER BY RAND()
I'm pulling about 20 random rows, most or all with WHERE clauses attached, in a table of 1000~2000 records. This won't grow by much, maybe 150 every year.
I'm also looking at a few thousand users at most, but with this query being part of a popular area of the site.
Do I really need to be concerned about performance hits where ORDER BY RAND() is concerned? I've heard all the horror stories about performance issues, but I haven't found much when such a small table is being hit constantly.
I can't do a cache for this.