Every now and then, we have customers who outgrow their single server setup. The next natural step is of course splitting the web layer from the DB layer. So they get another server, and move the database to that.

So far so good! A week or so later, we often get the call “Our page load time is higher now than before the upgrade! We’ve got twice as much hardware, and it’s slower! You have broken it!”
It’s easy to see where they’re coming from. It makes sense, right?

That is until you factor in the newly introduced network topology! Today it’s not unusual (that’s not to say it’s acceptable or optimal) for your average
wordpress/drupal/joomla/otherspawnofsatan site to run 40-50 queries per page load. Quite often even more!

Based on a tcpdump session of a reasonably average query (if there is such a thing), connecting to a server, authenticating, sending a query and receiving a 5 row …

A customer of ours was in this particular situation. They had a very decent hardware load balancer for their webservers with capacity to spare. So they ended up load balancing the mysql instances through the same device and using a piece of software I've written called mylbhelper.