I am not really familiar with mongoDB or PostgreSQL but I believe MySQL, MariaDB and Percona is probably from the same family tree and they all have their own optimization methods. I have heard good reviews over MariaDB but the original developers from MySQL is now at MariaDB

Sweet! I appreciate your input. I ended up going for MariaDB. It was a simple and painless transition. So far I am quite impressed with the performance and compatibility. Seems like the "waiting" time on load has gone down. Will do some more tweaking and testing. ^^

Question. Any thoughts on the HandlerSocket plug-in? Supposedly it can give MariaDB the same/similar speeds as NoSQL options. Haven't tried it.

https://mariadb.com/kb/en/mariadb/documentation/nosql/handlersocket/ < thats what I am referring to.

Hm, I have never personally tried this but I normally use MySQL with an optimized my.cnf setup

Any my.cnf tips?

There's actually quite a number of useful MySQL tweaks topics if you try to google them

Yeah, I have done quite a lot of tweaking, although I still think there is room for improvements. I have attached my current settings incase you or someone else in this great community has feedback on how to improve it

On an 8gb RAM setup with 6 core processor do these settings look reasonable? I have a feeling some of them might be set too high?

max_connections = 500
connect_timeout = 120
wait_timeout = 600
max_allowed_packet = 16M
thread_cache_size = 50
sort_buffer_size = 8M
bulk_insert_buffer_size = 16M
tmp_table_size = 256M
max_heap_table_size = 128M
myisam_recover = BACKUP
key_buffer_size = 1024M
open-files-limit = 65535
table-definition-cache = 4096
table_open_cache = 4096
myisam_sort_buffer_size = 512M
concurrent_insert = 2
read_buffer_size = 6M
read_rnd_buffer_size = 8M
query_cache_limit = 1024M
query-cache-type = 0
query-cache-size = 0
innodb_buffer_pool_size = 256M
innodb_log_buffer_size = 64M
innodb_file_per_table = 1
innodb_open_files = 1024
innodb_io_capacity = 400
innodb_flush_method = O_DIRECT
max_allowed_packet = 128M
key_buffer = 1024M

It does look pretty good to me but again, there's no direct optimized settings because the my.cnf settings varies from site to site depending on the usage / complexity of your SQL operations. I would normally fine tune it according to what we need / have and see where it brings us.

For instance on our forums we have close to about 400k - 500k posts I think and with only 4GB of memory, it's sufficient enough as our load is always between 0.01 ~ 0.4

Thanks for your feedback Any idea why my site is incredibly fast upon boot, but after awhile it gets slower and slower until I reboot?

What do you mean by "slower"? The load time or the response time? It's best to always check the logs in /var/logs/

I figured it out. For some odd reason Memcached was slowing the site down over time. Have temporarily switched Joomla back to File Cache while I diagnose the problem.

Thanks for updating Jannik I really think that you guys need to be really careful with what you are caching too and don't get too obsessed with caching. Caching would only make sense / helps if you have static contents. If you cache a very complex object, the scripts are eventually going to have to do a search / replace parts that shouldn't be cached and this normally hogs up a lot of your CPU process.