[riddle]

Restart mystery solved: WestHost changed something so mysqld required an IP bind address in my.cnf. Once I formally reported the problem to WestHost support, they had it fixed in minutes and were even kind enough to apologize. (I sure wish that init.d gave some diagnostics!)

That done, I turned on query caching:

query_cache_type=1

query_cache_limit=1M

query_cache_size=32M

The result is significant improvement but there may be more I can do. I’m now getting a median response time of about 0.125 seconds for 8 queries on the top page and 0.205 seconds for 12 queries on a topic page.

In phpMyAdmin the indicators are greatly improved but I still have a couple in the red zone:

Handler_read_rnd_next 15

(“The number of requests to read the next row in the data file. This is high if you are doing a lot of table scans. Generally this suggests that your tables are not properly indexed or that your queries are not written to take advantage of the indexes you have.”)

Key_reads 6

(“The number of physical reads of a key block from disk. If Key_reads is big, then your key_buffer_size value is probably too small. The cache miss rate can be calculated as Key_reads/Key_read_requests.” My key buffer size is 16M.)

Opened_tables 2

(“The number of tables that have been opened. If opened tables is big, your table cache value is probably too small.” My table cache is 64.)

I’m inclined to say this is good enough for now, but I’m always open for further suggestions.