<b>One MySQL setting matters. The rest is noise.</b>

<b>One MySQL setting matters. The rest is noise.</b>

People paste 40-line my.cnf 'optimizations' from 2012. On a small box, exactly one knob moves the needle:

— <code>innodb_buffer_pool_size = 512M</code> (set it to ~50-60% of RAM)

This is the cache that keeps your hot tables and indexes in memory instead of reading disk on every query. Default on a fresh install is a laughable 128M. Bumping it on a 2GB box cut my average query time in half with zero query changes. Set it, restart, done. Try it tonight.