hi, gosh. its such a wide question (well, the answer can be very open...). there are many many ways to optimise the DB - you can chuck more memory at the server settings - increase the buffers etc. you can add more index keys to the tables... you can change the DB engine - eg InnoDB instead or MyISAM (default) - heck, even switch to postgres insteaa (some will claim its orders faster! ;-) ). in essence I'd start with the usual basic optmisations - move to a my.cnf file thats inline with the large or huge .cnf examples but then I'd look at your queries and find why they take so long - use the 'explain' command to emulate the select and inserts...find out what causes the locks etc. you can also turn on the slow debug for mysql and see what and where things are lurking. theres also useful tools to explain what and where your mysql settings are failing - that give pointers to better performance. the real optimisations will come from analysis of the data going into the DB and how its being used...I've achieved huge gains with such DB table tweaking for minimal memory loss - searches orders of magnitude faster. alan