When trying to do some Linux tuning for MySQL, there are a few options that will greatly influence the speed of MySQL. Below are some of the most important of these settings to help you get started.
Swappiness
The first thing to look at is what swappiness is set to. This will determine the tendency of the kernel to swap out memory pages. In may cases, you will want to set this to "1" to keep the swapping to a minimum. A value of "0" will disable it entirely.