Regardless of whether you're running a single MySQL server or a cluster of multiple servers, one thing you are always interested in is squeezing the maximum performance out of your system. MySQL's developers were well aware of this, and so they provided a fairly comprehensive list of performance variables that you can monitor in real time to check the health and performance of your MySQL server.

MySQLTuner is a Perl script that analyzes your MySQL performance and, based on the statistics it gathers, gives recommendations which variables you should adjust in order to increase performance. That way, you can tune your my.cnf file to tease out the last bit of performance from your MySQL server and make it work more efficiently.

To solve MySQL problems or to optimize MySQL server you need to use special tool called mytop. It is a UNIX top command clone for MySQL server. It updates every few seconds, so you can get a reasonable look at your SQL performance. It is capable of displaying a huge amount of information.

MySQLTuner is a script written in Perl that will assist you with your MySQL configuration and make recommendations for increased performance and stability. Within seconds, it will display statistics about your MySQL installation and the areas where it can be improved.

According to What's New in MySQL 5.6, MySQL 5.6 will bring some performance improvements over MySQL 5.5. If you want to test out MySQL 5.6, you have to install one of the development releases from the MySQL downloads page because there is no stable release yet. This tutorial explains how to install the MySQL 5.6.8rc1 (Linux Generic) development release on an Ubuntu 12.10 server.

If you are using nginx as your webserver, you are looking for a performance boost and better speed. nginx is fast by default, but you can optimize its performance and the performance of all parts (like PHP and MySQL) that work together with nginx. Here is a small, incomprehensive list of tips and tricks to configure your LEMP system (Linux, nginx, MySQL, PHP-FPM) for maximum performance.

MySQLTuner is a script written in Perl that will assist you with your MySQL configuration and make recommendations for increased performance and stability. Within seconds, it will display statistics about your MySQL installation and the areas where it can be improved.

MySQL and Solaris are both using an advanced tracing tool to smoke out performance problems, and Linux doesn't have anything like it.

You might know that beginning with MySQL 5.1.24, support for the NDBCLUSTER storage engine was removed from the standard MySQL server binaries built by MySQL. Therefore, here I'm using MySQL Cluster edition instead of MySQL Community edition.