As part of our subscription-based Web development projects, we maintain and tune MySQL databases with over 10M records on a regular basis. These MySQL databases are accessed via Internet on a daily basis by hunderds of thousands to millons of users. Our PHP prgrammers and MySQL developers always seek advice on how to deal with performance concerns when it comes to MySQL bottlenecks. Among many other sources, we use the net for a great deal of our tuning tips. In this article, you will find such tips on an on-going basis. Even though we focus on MySQL performance for PHP applications, most of the tips discussed here will work for other languages such as Ruby, Perl, Python, etc. issues

The very first step for you is to identify the tables that are becoming a performance problem for your PHP applications. Usually, tables that are too large (hundreds of thousands to millions of records) or frequently accessed are the usual suspects.

Once you have identified such tables, you are ready to tune them for high performance.