Tabulas got moved to a separate database server (it's no longer shared with anybody). Unlike the old DB server, this one has 2GB RAM (up from 512MB) and uses SATA hard drives (instead of EIDE) so iowait should be low. I've been surfing through Tabulas, and it seems LOADS faster. The server's been up for roughly six hours now and it hasn't even GROANED in speed yet. Some fun statistics from mySQL:

• Bytes sent per hour: 250MB
• Queries per second: 101.48
• Open tables: 141
• Opened tables: 165
• Key reads: 76314
• Key read requests: 24601631

I've gotten to be relatively mediocre at modifying my.cnf (mySQL configuration file which handles the memory management), so the configuration is pretty optimal right now. The key reads/key read request ratio isn't quite optimal yet, but it's something I can work on.

mySQL's query caching (yes, I *just* upgraded to mySQL 4.0) seems to be working nicely as well.

w00t.