wheel - 1:25 am on Oct 26, 2011 (gmt 0)

Yeah, I've got them looking into that right now. I added these two lines to my.cnf:
#long_query_time = 1
#log-slow-queries = /var/log/mysqld/mysql-slow.log

And that showed the specific queries causing the problem. Basically one page where there's a huge pig of a query to generate all the data, and a very popular page.

If he gets it down faster, maybe no new server needed. if not, looks like I'm in for a long overdue server upgrade.

I may have todo some more research on the SATA III because it seems like the drives won't actually push through big volumes as fast as an SSD drive.