Re: Changing table engine to innodb manually

[Peter Brawley]

Upgrading tables to InnoDB will provide much better optimisation opportunities.

If you follow that path, you should set up a copy of the production system, do the Alter Table commands there, turn on the slow query log,increase innodb_buffer_pool_size to perhaps 2GB, optimise the slow queries, add transactional logic where appropriate, regression test, then replicate those changes on the production system in off-peak hours.