my.cnf

What a difference a little conf file makes!

So, we here at AFP548.com are by no means DBAs in any way shape or form. We cross our fingers every time we upgrade the server that MySQL works when it comes up. We're not sure what we'd do if it didn't.

We'd been happily living in blissful ignorance of query languages until traffic started picking up on the site. You may have noticed some longer than normal page load times over the last few weeks. Turns out that MySQL was woefully under provisioned since we didn't have an /etc/my.cnf file.

You'll find a few sample ones in /usr/share/mysql. We picked the my-large.cnf and copied it over to /etc/my.cnf and BOY HOWDY! Page creation times are about 300% faster than what they were. This is especially noticeable in the forums. This has got to be the quickest tuning with the most reward that I've ever done.

Now, there's boatloads of variables in these files and I'm not sure what the vast majority of them really are, so enter into this with a bit of caution. YMMV, blah blah blah.