LOAD INDEX INTO CACHE
  tbl_index_list [, tbl_index_list] ...

tbl_index_list:
  tbl_name
    [[INDEX|KEY] (index_name[, index_name] ...)]
    [IGNORE LEAVES]

The LOAD INDEX INTO CACHE statement preloads a table index into the key cache to which it has been assigned by an explicit CACHE INDEX statement, or into the default key cache otherwise. LOAD INDEX INTO CACHE is used only for MyISAM tables. It is not supported for tables having user-defined partitioning (see Section 18.5, “Restrictions and Limitations on Partitioning”.)

The IGNORE LEAVES modifier causes only blocks for the nonleaf nodes of the index to be preloaded.

The following statement preloads nodes (index blocks) of indexes for the tables t1 and t2:

mysql> LOAD INDEX INTO CACHE t1, t2 IGNORE LEAVES;
+---------+--------------+----------+----------+
| Table   | Op           | Msg_type | Msg_text |
+---------+--------------+----------+----------+
| test.t1 | preload_keys | status   | OK       |
| test.t2 | preload_keys | status   | OK       |
+---------+--------------+----------+----------+

This statement preloads all index blocks from t1. It preloads only blocks for the nonleaf nodes from t2.

The syntax of LOAD INDEX INTO CACHE enables you to specify that only particular indexes from a table should be preloaded. The current implementation preloads all the table's indexes into the cache, so there is no reason to specify anything other than the table name.

LOAD INDEX INTO CACHE ... IGNORE LEAVES fails unless all indexes in a table have the same block size. (Prior to MySQL 5.1.19, it fails even without IGNORE LEAVES.) You can determine index block sizes for a table by using myisamchk -dv and checking the Blocksize column.