Tuning Other Factors

Finally, there are a few tips that may help with your physical setup.

With regard to your operating system, MySQL recommends Solaris for getting the most out of multiple CPU machines. Although MySQL is used across various operating systems, development and initial testing are done on Solaris, so this would logically be the most optimized platform.

If you have access to multiple disks, you can improve performance by putting different databases on different disks. You can also use RAID ”RAID 0 will improve reading and writing performance, and RAID 1 or 5 will improve reading performance. You will also get better performance from SCSI drives than IDE drives .

You may also consider the use of a journaling file system, such as Reiserfs or XFS. These may give a performance gain.

Obviously, a large and basic gain can be made by having fast networks between clients and servers and between masters and slaves when using replication.