CPU Usage

Databases
1

I run a MySQL based portal. I am currently on

server version: 4.1.22-standard-log

My portal is on a dedicated server with the following processor and memory

Processor: Intel E4500 Dual Core
Memory: 2GB DDR SDRAM

I do not have significant traffic. At peak hours, I have 20-30 hits a minute. During these hours I see the CPU usages for mysqld consistently in the range of 120% to 150% when I use top command. When I use htop, I see mysql processes at 100% - I am not very familiar with Linux, so I am unable to judge how bad this is. I have not seen a serious degradation in response time for the http requests as yet. However, the hits are likely to go up and I need to understand the implications.

The database is not very well designed and I am looking at areas of problems. Mostly, I do not use joins. But there are successive queries (4 to 5) to the database to come up with each http response. The tables sizes are not huge, 15-20 thousand rows in the largest of the tables.

I would appreciate some advice as to how bad the CPU usages are and what can I do to make this more efficient.

Thanks for your help.

2

The table are mostly normalized. I am reviewing indexes to see if I need to put some. However, to implement changes or to upgrade will take a little of time.

Since, I do not see a significant performance problem as yet, I have not worked towards fixing this. I would like to understand, how bad is the CPU usage.

Thanks

3

You might want to consider upgrading your mysql version, the current “Generally Available” release of the community edition (the free version) is 5.1

Have all the tables been normalised?