> Am I being affected by a noisy neighbor? Can't tell; contact Amazon support. Sure, you can. Spin up multiple RDS's and benchmark them. > Can I look at top t

> Am I being affected by a noisy neighbor? Can't tell; contact Amazon support. Sure, you can. Spin up multiple RDS's and benchmark them. > Can I look at top to see if the load is high on the box, and potentially why? If you ar using top to monitor your box, you are already screwed. There is lots of support for remote monitoring. > Can I look at the disk iops to see if there's any kind of problem there? Disk iops are part of the built in monitoring and metrics provided with RDS. > Can I look at the slow log? Kind of. They'll push the slow log data into the database for you to query, but then you can't use tools to do aggregate tracking. If only there was a tool that could extract records from a database and compute aggregates... > So, after many hours swapping emails with Amazon support, we've determined that we're actually spending a lot of time waiting on malloc mutexes. The internet says that using a non-default version of malloc will help with that - can I do that? >Nope. You're stuck. MySQL sucks. RDS provides no means to make it any better. Fortunately they do now provide PostgreSQL. > Offsite backups that are in any form but MySQL dumps. You can do that by replicating to an external MySQL server and doing whatever the heck you want with it. > * Take advantage of new index types and compression support from TokuDB. Yup. Until today it was also really hard to take advantage of different engines found in PostgreSQL. ;-) This is a totally different product. In general, all of the stuff you are describing are features, not things that cause maintenance complexity. In fact, manipulating those things causes maintenance complexity. > Databases just aren't that hard to set up. Install packages, install config files, start the DB, restore from a backup file, restart the DB, and you're golden. I had no idea PCI compliance could be that simple. ;-) > This is particularly simple when you use an orchestration tool; I recommend Ansible personally. Yes, orchestration tools, if set up properly are exactly how you'd want to do this kind of thing. If you already have all that setup to manage your database, RDS is likely not going to help.