Replication can be used to distribute the load across multiple machines, particularly in a SELECT-heavy environment: this also reduces (or eliminates) lock contention on the master server when writing data. [mysqld] log-bin server-id=1 [mysqld] set-variable = max_connections=200 log-bin master-host=192.168.0.1 master-user=repl master-password=foobar master-port=3306 server-id=2