Sams Teach Yourself PHP, MySQL® and Apache All in One

Summary

Running an optimized MySQL server starts with the hardware and operating system in use. Your system's CPU should be sufficiently fast, and you should have enough RAM in use to pick up the slack when your CPU struggles. This is especially true if MySQL shares resources with other processes, such as a Web server. Additionally, the hard drive in use is important because a small hard drive will limit the amount of information you can store in your database. The seek time of your hard drive is important—a slow seek time will cause the overall performance of the server to be slower. Your operating system should not overwhelm your machine and should share resources with MySQL rather than using all the resources itself.

Some key startup parameters ...