But again, there is plenty of RAM free. I'm running the SQL Administrator and it says the server is only being 5% used. All the cache hits seem great. Here are my settings - what do you think is set incorrectly?
I'm a database designer and have done a ton of work with MS-SQL, Oracle etc - this forum system really isn't that big at all ...
---------------
# The maximum amount of concurrent sessions the MySQL server will
# allow. One of these connections will be reserved for a user with
# SUPER privileges to allow the administrator to login even if the
# connection limit has been reached.
max_connections=800
# Query cache is used to cache SELECT results and later return them
# without actual executing the same query once again. Having the query
# cache enabled may result in significant speed improvements, if your
# have a lot of identical queries and rarely changing tables. See the
# "Qcache_lowmem_prunes" status variable to check if the current value
# is high enough for your load.
# Note: In case your tables change very often or if your queries are
# textually different every time, the query cache may result in a
# slowdown instead of a performance improvement.
query_cache_size=33M
# The number of open tables for all threads. Increasing this value
# increases the number of file descriptors that mysqld requires.
# Therefore you have to make sure to set the amount of open files
# allowed to at least 4096 in the variable "open-files-limit" in
# section [mysqld_safe]
table_cache=1520
# Maximum size for internal (in-memory) temporary tables. If a table
# grows larger than this value, it is automatically converted to disk
# based table This limitation is for a single table. There can be many
# of them.
tmp_table_size=16M
# How many threads we should keep in a cache for reuse. When a client
# disconnects, the client's threads are put in the cache if there aren't
# more than thread_cache_size threads from before. This greatly reduces
# the amount of thread creations needed if you have a lot of new
# connections. (Normally this doesn't give a notable performance
# improvement if you have a good thread implementation.)
thread_cache_size=38
#*** MyISAM Specific options
# The maximum size of the temporary file MySQL is allowed to use while
# recreating the index (during REPAIR, ALTER TABLE or LOAD DATA INFILE.
# If the file-size would be bigger than this, the index will be created
# through the key cache (which is slower).
myisam_max_sort_file_size=100G
# If the temporary file used for fast index creation would be bigger
# than using the key cache by the amount specified here, then prefer the
# key cache method. This is mainly used to force long character keys in
# large tables to use the slower key cache method to create the index.
myisam_max_extra_sort_file_size=100G
# If the temporary file used for fast index creation would be bigger
# than using the key cache by the amount specified here, then prefer the
# key cache method. This is mainly used to force long character keys in
# large tables to use the slower key cache method to create the index.
myisam_sort_buffer_size=64M
# Size of the Key Buffer, used to cache index blocks for MyISAM tables.
# Do not set it larger than 30% of your available memory, as some memory
# is also required by the OS to cache rows. Even if you're not using
# MyISAM tables, you should still set it to 8-64M as it will also be
# used for internal temporary disk tables.
key_buffer_size=256M
# Size of the buffer used for doing full table scans of MyISAM tables.
# Allocated per thread, if a full scan is needed.
read_buffer_size=1M
read_rnd_buffer_size=4M
# This buffer is allocated when MySQL needs to rebuild the index in
# REPAIR, OPTIMZE, ALTER table statements as well as in LOAD DATA INFILE
# into an empty table. It is allocated per thread so be careful with
# large settings.
sort_buffer_size=4M
key_buffer = 256M
max_allowed_packet = 1M
