For a full description of all syste

For a full description of all system and status variables, see Section 5.1.4, “Server System Variables”, and Section 5.1.6, “Server Status Variables”.

MySQL uses algorithms that are very scalable, so you can usually run with very little memory. However, normally you get better performance by giving MySQL more memory.

When tuning a MySQL server, the two most important variables to configure are key_buffer_size and table_cache. You should first feel confident that you have these set appropriately before trying to change any other variables.

The following examples indicate some typical variable values for different runtime configurations.

If you have at least 256MB of memory and many tables and want maximum performance with a moderate number of clients, you should use something like this: