I have over 1000 posts here at MaisonBisson, but even so, the table with all those posts is under 3MB. Now I’ve got a project with 150,000 posts — yes, 150,000 posts! — and the table is about 500MB. An associated table, structured sort of like WP’s postsmeta, has over 1.5 million records and weighs in at over 100MB (not including the 150MB of indexes).
Up to now I’ve been a “throw more hardware at it” sort of guy — and in a server with only 1GB of RAM, that’s probably the best solution — but I also think it’s time I learned some MySQL optimization tricks. Zach‘s been pushing me to get mytop installed for quite a while, and I finally got around to it.
mytop is a console-based (non-gui) tool for monitoring the threads and overall performance of a MySQL 3.22.x, 3.23.x, and 4.x server. It runs on most Unix systems (including Mac OS X) which have Perl, DBI, and Term::ReadKey installed. And with Term::ANSIColor installed you even get color. If you install Time::HiRes, you’ll get good real-time queries/second stats.