Tuning MySQL DB server

[Vimal Shah]

Hello all,

I recently had many teachers and students logging into my site, this is a
good thing. The server infrastructure (Linode VPS = 1 load balancer => 2
webservers and 1 database (DB) server) started to show CPUs that were
railing at peaks times on the Munin graphs. This was not so good. The
bandaid (which I need to fix) was to add more servers, I now have 5
webservers each have 2GB of RAM and have 2.2.7 GHz CPU (4 of them on each
box). This has to be overkill..  Later, realized that MySQL's system
variables were not optimized for the DB server. Ran Percona's configuration
tool <https://tools.percona.com/> along with the mysqltunner perl
script<https://github.com/rackerhacker/MySQLTuner-perl>.
 This led to the discovery that 32-bit version of Ubuntu will not allow
MySQL to use any more that 2GB.

NEW DB server = After upgrading the DB server to 8GB and along with going
to 64-bit Ubuntu 10.04, I am *still unable to get to the box to use all the
memory*. The process I've been using is (1) use apache bench or jmeter to
fling large connections (and long queries) at the DB server (2) run the
tuner script to see it's recommendations to the system variables (2) update
the variables, restart mysql and start over.

This has led to unsatisfactory results. I know that fixing the slow queries
(which is in process) is a place to start, but I feel that the DB server
should be using more RAM. Can someone point out the flaws in my process or
maybe even suggest a better way to do this?

Thank you very much for you time.

First day DBA,
-Vimal

PS Thanks Eric C., for starting me down the right direction.
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