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jerodev's avatar

Does a dedicated MySQL server help performance?

Hi everyone,

I wonder what the benefits are of having a MySQL server on its own. And I don't necessarily mean a dedicated server, just a VPS dedicated to the MySQL server.

Lately, I've been noticing my website is struggling a bit at busy moments, and I'm at the point where an infrastructure upgrade might be needed. Currently, all applications run on one server, including database, Redis, Elasticsearch. But I'm not sure what would be better, adding resources to this server or moving the database to its own optimized server.

Does anyone have experience with this?

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3 replies
Snapey's avatar

having the database server over the network will introduce some network latency so initially there will be some drop in performance, but as load increases the ability to dedicate resources to the database server will cause it to out perform local database. It dan be disappointing in the first instance but a better long term strategy

Tray2's avatar

Agreed, a dedicated server(s) for the database is a good idea to handle performance, but it should be as step 5 or 6, and not step one.

Step 1 - 5 should always be database and application tuning.

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jerodev's avatar

I agree that application tuning should be the first option here. Which I have already done a lot of in the last few months. The thing is that I have budget left for server upgrades, but I'm not sure if I buy more servers or upgrade the existing one.

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