Handling MySQL Performance Bottlenecks During Peak Traffic

[Kasper Infotech]

Hi all,

I’m currently optimizing a MySQL-based system that handles high read and write traffic. I’ve already applied some common improvements like

Proper indexing

Query optimization (avoiding SELECT *)

Partitioning for large tables

Still, when peak traffic hits, I notice a performance dip—mainly in queries involving joins across multiple large tables.

I’d love to hear from this community:

Do you rely more on denormalization, or do you prefer to stick to strict normalization even for large datasets?

Have you found connection pooling to significantly reduce overhead in such cases?

What’s your favorite monitoring tool to quickly identify slow queries in production?

It's always beneficial to gain knowledge from practical experiences rather than relying solely on theoretical concepts.



(P.S. I mostly work on web applications where database performance is critical, so discussions like these directly help me and my team at Kasper Infotech when we’re scaling client systems.)