This article should help a Linux system administrator with optimizing a server for Web/Database usage. This article will be useful for any type of server as it has some general tweaks listed, however the article is geared towards MySQL and Apache 2.
*** The author takes no responsibility for the effect of the use of this guide upon the user’s computer.
Kernel tweaking
/etc/sysctl.conf is used to modify kernel parameters at runtime. The parameters
available are those listed under /proc/sys/