In the early 2000s, the web hosting industry was still evolving quite a bit. We had recently started offering PHP and MySQL as an alternative to using Perl CGI

In the early 2000s, the web hosting industry was still evolving quite a bit. We had recently started offering PHP and MySQL as an alternative to using Perl CGI scripts. Then we notice the server is getting terribly slow. They were under a high load and finally my boss at the time figured out why: The disks were being hammered by database reads and writes. I was the junior most among the three of us who managed servers, and I recall standing In a circle one afternoon discussing the problem and possible solutions. We considered things like building dedicated database servers, And I really don't recall what else. But while I was thinking about the problem, any delightfully simple answer came to mind. I presented my idea and it was adopted right away. Better than that, it solved the problem. The hack? Install another hard drive and put /var/lib/MySQL on it. These days that would be a terrible solution. But back then we were running things like Celeron 300s in giant 4U cases and had plenty of power and space overhead to make room for another disk