If you’re using phpMyAdmin, I would highly recommend you consider an alternative ASAP:

Adminer - http://www.adminer.org/

Why? Let’s go through the laundry list of things that drive me nuts about phpMyAdmin:

• On time-outs, after logging back in, it randomly gives you weird session errors and forces you to log in again.
• It is *slllowww*. Anything over 200 tables seems unbearably slow even on the very latest of hardware.
• Cluttered, overcomplicated UI.
• Only supports MySQL.
• Annoying modal pop-up windows telling you about successes/errors, that always get in the way of the AJAX table value editing.

What does Adminer have to offer?

• An easy to use, clean UI that actually lets you get stuff done.
• It is blazing fast compared to phpMyAdmin or any other db management tool I’ve used.
• Drivers for MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, MS SQL, Oracle, SimpleDB, Elasticsearch, and MongoDB.

I particularly like this theme from http://bueltge.de/ for it: 

• Theme: adminer

This is what an ESXi performance chart looks like around the time of a WordPress brute-force login attack.

Essentially a couple of robots (3 separate IP addresses) were trying over and over and over again (tens of times per second) to log in to WordPress via the wp-login.php script.

The drop-off in the CPU usage is when we banned the 3 IP addresses via the firewall.