Summary

There is an entire book's worth of material on MySQL optimization, so be sure to continue reading and researching for yourself.

• You may obtain a performance gain by compiling the MySQL binary yourself, especially if you are running Linux on a Pentium machine.

• Tune server parameters for a performance boost, particularly those relating to memory usage. More physical memory is always a good thing, but allocating it is more important. These are some particularly important parameters:

  • key_buffer_size : Amount of memory used for storing MyISAM indexes.

  • table_cache : Number of tables that can be open at once.

  • read_buffer_size : Amount of memory used to store data from full table scans .

  • sort_buffer : Amount of memory used to store table data to be sorted for ORDER BY .

• Tune hardware with more memory, use of RAID, use of a journaling file system, and a fast network between clients and servers and masters and slaves.