tuning

So I decided to try my hand at MySQL tuning to improve the crappy performance that we get out of the site sometimes. I'm not sure if the problem is with the database or not but it is a starting point. I've given some a small amount of memory to caching so things like RSS feeds and the small comment block can pull from the cache. According to:

mysqladmin -u -p extended-status

we get a lot of table scans. That hints at an index problem so I've run 'analyze table' on node and users to see if that helps. The next step would be to locate some queries and run 'explain' on them. Maybe we need some more indexes. Maybe we need to upgrade our version of Drupal. The former will likely happen long before the latter.