[webvet]

Thanks for your in-depth reply and suggestions.

MySQL performance tuning and table structure/query optimization-wise, we've left few stones unturned (but I'm sure there still is a scope for further improvement - isn't there always?).

Not using Rails.

Server specs: 4 cores, 3.2GB RAM

>and the easiest route is just to upgrade your server.

Please refer to the other thread for more on this.

Thanks again.

[AznHisoka]

I hope you're paying less than $10/month because you can get a dedicated server with 10 times more RAM here: http://www.ovh.com/us/dedicated-servers/

And how many reads are there usually a min? writes?

[webvet]

Paying way more than $10/mo for the VPS, close to 200 - and hey!! thanks for the ovh.com link - looks very interesting, will certainly try them out soon. Thanks.

[staunch]

Your server barely has more RAM than my phone. Your disk almost certainly has less reliable performance than my laptop's.

If you're doing something that makes any money you should get a real server before wasting days of effort or intentionally causing repeated outages.

[yogo]

Can you post which mpm you are using, and what your mpm configuration looks like for Apache? Does mysql report anything in its log? Do any requests return too many connections? Do you have some kind of heavy software running on the same server (trac for instance)? What kind of table engine are you using? Are you caching read data?