Originally Posted by SteveS
dell PowerEdge R200
Dual-core Xeon 3060
4096 MB Memory
160 GB x2 SATA RAID 1

I have never optimized anything, but the host may have.

You're probably suffering from a untuned MySQL Installation. Sounds like you're on a dedicated server, and in every case I've seen the MySQL config is the default configuration.

You're probably going to see immediate improvements if you spend some time tuning MySQL. I'd recommend using http://wiki.mysqltuner.com/MySQLTuner]MySQLTuner or hiring someone to tune it for you.

If you do it yourself, run it the first time, adjust some of the variables as noted and then restart MySQL. Let it run for 24 hours or so and then run it again. Adjust the variables as noted and repeat.

It will take some time, but when finished you'll have a pretty good configuration running. Beyond that it really takes understanding the variables and statistics to tune any further.