I'm going to have to backup jdub on this. The "IO/database should be" classic wisdom has not really held up to my experience doing a stint providing managed su

I'm going to have to backup jdub on this. The "IO/database should be" classic wisdom has not really held up to my experience doing a stint providing managed support for LAMP(P as in PHP) servers at a hosting company. Most of the time there were performance issues it was PHP taking up the CPU's. We had a lot of success mitigating this for people with some proper varnish configs. Very rarely was the issue with the databases. I've had people not want to normalize data and create some generally disgusting tables and code because "joins bad"... On tables that will only ever have a few 10k records. If you have the proper indexes and queries in place, your database is just traversing btree's in memory and it will be blazing fast.