MySQL joins and COUNT(*) from another table

Question

I have two tables: groups and group_members.

The groups table contains all the information for each group, such as its ID, tit

Answer 1

Maybe I am off the mark here and not understanding the OP but why are you joining tables?

If you have a table with members and this table has a column named "group_id", you can just run a query on the members table to get a count of the members grouped by the group_id.

SELECT group_id, COUNT(*) as membercount 
FROM members 
GROUP BY group_id 
HAVING membercount > 4

This should have the least overhead simply because you are avoiding a join but should still give you what you wanted.

If you want the group details and description etc, then add a join from the members table back to the groups table to retrieve the name would give you the quickest result.