When optimizing my.cnf.

general question

[Doood]

When you set up your my.cnf file should you wait until your server is under max load and the settings will be fine for when you don't have many queries also?

Do you watch your logs and make changes to my.cnf often or pretty much just set it and forget it?

Right now my my.cnf is emtpy with no settings and everything runs ok for the time being, but I'm slowly increasing load everyday and will need to get it optimized soon.

[wheel]

Set it....and forget it!

I don't think that you should have to tweak my.cnf more than once initially. And if it's tweaked to work at high volume, it should work fine at lower volume, so no sense waiting.

I think my my.cnf file is almost out of the box, though I always double check that networking is turned off.

[SeanW]

I periodically watch the server with mytop, mysqlard, and mysqlreport to see if anything needs changing. It depends on the server though, some I rarely have to touch, others I check back in every few weeks to make sure things are running well.

Checking on your server also points out the slow queries, which can point to missing/outdated indexes, or just bad querying.

Sean

[Doood]

Thanks for the info. I wish I had time to learn all those progams mentioned cause actually I think it would be fun.

I was looking around and MySQL Administrator looks really nice with a full gui and easy to understand controls. google it.

[SeanW]

Dood: If there's one package you get, make it mysqlard. It produces graphs of key metrics, and also gives you tuning advice (ie increase table_cache, decrease max_connections), etc.

Sean