MySQL database optimization best practices

Question

What are the best practices for optimizing a MySQL installation for best performance when handling somewhat larger tables (> 50k records with a total of around 100MB per table)?

Answer 1

There are tons of best practices which have been previously discussed so there is no reason to repeat them. For actually concrete advice on what to do, I would try running MySQL Tuner. Its a perl script that you can download and then run on your database server, it will give you a bunch of statistics on how your database is performing (e.g. cache hits) along with some concrete recommendations for what issues or config parameters need to be adjusted to improve performance.

While these statistics are all available in MySQL itself, I find that this tool provides them in a much easier to understand fashion. While it is important to note that YMMV with respect to the recommendations, I have found them to generally be pretty accurate. Just make sure that you have done a good job exercising the database beforehand with realistic traffic.