So I am currently weathering a wave of traffic from the popularity of this link and discovering where my hardware limits are. Last night, the MySQL server was terminated when the machine ran out of swap space.
Aug 6 23:46:39 shuttle pid 1260 (mysqld), uid 88, was killed: out of swap space
So I added some (slow) disk-based swap, and you all now face the interminable delays as the kernel tries to work with that.
shuttle swap_pager: indefinite wait buffer: bufobj: 0, blkno: 778064, size: 8192
This too shall pass.
I’m sure some people will claim that WordPress is TeH Suxxor and that’s where the blame lies, but I have lived through my MT days, with the rebuilding of pages that didn’t change each time you make a new post, with endless comment delays (how many MT site comment forms have “please submit once only” to assuage their users’ impatience?), with comment spam, and more stuff I have happily forgotten.
Looks like some tuning tips I found here helped.