General advices for high performance mySQL ?

If you are careful and precise, you can use a slave server for any read-only task. This involves writing some custom code, and you should be certain that the mysql connection credentials Drupal will use don't have write access to the slave (don't break your binary logs), but it totally works.

If you're stuck using drupal search instead of solr, that's a good one. Anything else computationally intensive (reports, etc) are also smart.

The secret sauce is that the $db_conf variable in your settings.php can be an array. So you can have a $db_conf['default'] and $db_conf['slave'], and then in your custom code you can db_set_active():

http://api.drupal.org/api/function/db_set_active/6

This command will return whatever db was previously engaged, so a good rule of thumb is to have your code run like:

In most situations you're just going back to 'default', but inserting this little extra bit of discipline will save you should you ever get to a more complex setup like different slave servers for different purposes, or a totally unrelated external DB connection.

http://www.chapterthree.com | http://www.outlandishjosh.com

I'm in the process of building out a drupal 7 test server running Nginx, PHP-FPM 5.3.0 configured with mysqlnd. So far, with no APC or memcache the performance is spectacular. I don't have benchmarks but it's like night and day from my old apache setup.

There are some gotchas when setting this up (PHP-FPM, PHP 5.3.0 and mysqlnd are all definitely on the bleeding edge of a server config) but the effort is worth it.