title: MySQL database optimization best practices
body: <p>What are the best practices for optimizing a MySQL installation for best performance when handling somewhat larger tables (> 50k records with a total of around 100MB per table)? We are currently looking into rewriting DelphiFeeds.com (a news site for the Delphi programming community) and noticed that simple Update statements can take up to 50ms. This seems like a lot. Are there any recommended configuration settings that we should enable/set that are typically disabled on a standard MySQL installation (e.g. to take advantage of more RAM to cache queries and data and so on)?</p>
  
  <p>Also, what performance implications does the choice of storage engines have? We are planning to go with InnoDB, but if MyISAM is recommended for performance reasons, we might use MyISAM.</p>