Originally Posted by rowan

I must confess to not really doing any sort of methodical stress or performance testing so far, but I can say that the server is quite happily handling a database with over half a billion rows of data. The only issue is that if I set mysql's key_buffer value larger than about 4985M it seems to "wrap" and drops down to 900MB size. I don't think it's a FreeBSD issue (eg a per-process limit) because increasing the size of other buffers increases the total memory that mysql uses. Anyway, it's not a big worry since I can't expand the RAM further with the current mainboard, but it's something to keep in mind for the future.