Well, happy and sad for me, actually.

The server tweaks that I've done have really made a difference, but I'm a bit confused by what I'm seeing, I have to admit.

You see, the improvements really did work on the server as a whole. The load average stays pretty low most of the time. The average in a 24 hour period is 1.2, but during light times it hangs out at 0.5. This I like. What's rather surprising, however, is that the execution time of the controller script is at around 1 second. I really expected it to drop to sub-second execution. In fact, with it running for so long, I really expected the server load to be higher. This is what's bothering me. How is it that the app is running without a lot of improvement, but the server load has improved dramatically? My suspicion before was that the DB was the bottleneck in the whole process and once that was improved, the app would return immediately. I guess it really is time to fix that program and see where the hangup is.

Speaking of evil. Tuning Databases is right up there. Sure, you get to run through and check table reads, index caching, memory allocation, etc. It's like a big puzzle that you get to analyze and put together. You definitely have to be in the right mood for it or it can just be a world of suck. But the bigger problem is when you make changes and then the database refuses to restart. Sure it exits just fine, but the important part is starting back up. Twice I've had the database refuse to start after making some tweaks. And it doesn't really complain about any of the changes. To make matters worse, untweaking doesn't help. So far what I've found is that I have to replace its configuration file with one that's empty, start the server, replace it with a tweaked config file, then restart. Things then seem to go just dandy. I don't make the rules, so don't blame me if that sounds silly.