Speaking of fine-tuning the system, would it be right to assume that if something takes AGES (say 10 secs.) to load, but the footnote shows up as "Generated in 0.025 seconds in which 0.009 seconds were spent on a total of 8 queries. Zlib compression disabled"...
...then it's not MySQL's fault? Would it still be the server's fauly (maybe other stuff lined up?), or could it simply be the connection?