Had to do some fine tuning of MySQL 4.1.9 and here is what my.cnf file looks like for a 2GHz machine with 1GB of memory. [mysqld] socket=/path/to/mysql.sock datadir=/var/lib/mysql skip-locking skip-innodb # MySQL 4.x has query caching available. # Enable it for vast improvement and it may be all you need to tweak. query_cache_type=1 query_cache_limit=1M query_cache_size=32M # max_connections=500 #