databases

This article is for database server administrators or those who plan on being one soon, who want to have an efficient setup for serving database requests. This article primarily focuses on disk arrangement, partitioning, mounting, and making HugePages available to MySQL - in essence, setting up the server to run MySQL efficiently.

my.cnf configuration will be discussed in the next two articles, which will be more valuable to a wider class of users. VPS users should mostly focus on the tmpfs portion of this article, below, as they can safely make use of that. Some VPSes can also use HugePages, so if you can take advantage of them, do so.

This article is the first in a series for community owners who have outgrown a VPS or a larger shared hosting environment, and need their own server to handle similar load levels without running into bottlenecks, but want advice about what they need, from someone who has been there. Since both of my major communities are adult, I created this site in part to serve as a decidedly non-adult repository for presenting what I have learned.

For my own experience, I run two of the most active communities on the Internet - Elliquiy Adult Roleplaying Forums and the Blue Moon Sexual Role Playing Forum. The splash page of each forum does not involve anything racy, but the images and text inside of said forums might not be so gentle on the pure of mind - be forewarned.

As you take up more and more of your host's resources on a machine - whether high-end VPS or high-end shared - you are going to consume more and more of its I/O bandwidth. On a good host, this will typically be higher than what your first dedicated server would be - however, you are at the mercy of everyone else on the machine. And you will notice, repeatedly. When you or your host get fed up with this, it's time to move to a dedicated machine.