rationalwiki.org is getting hammered again. It looks like MySQL is the busiest portion - seriously just doing a lot of work. Our current arrangement is: one box for MySQL, Apache, Lucene (the latter reindexing weekly); two Squids; a load balancer. These are all virtual machines on Linode (who we like). Apache and Squid boxes are Ubuntu 12.04 servers. The *usual* thing when we get hammered is that Reddit discovers an amusing tumbleweed article. The squids take care of this, of course. But then something like the Bill Nye/Ken Ham debate happens, we score pretty highly in Google for skeptical material and a wide variety of articles gets hit and MySQL has to work for a living. So, what's a good approach to scaling up MySQL on a VM? Add more memory? Add more cores? (How's MySQL 5.5-ubuntu do for multicore?) We can trivially add more Squids, and we haven't doubled up on Apache but shirley that won't be entirely unfeasible. - d.