I presume the reason it was slow was because the domains table was write heavy. There are multiple crons running in the background selecting data from the domai

I presume the reason it was slow was because the domains table was write heavy. There are multiple crons running in the background selecting data from the domains table, accessing external APIs and updating individual records. Selects per hour: 37K Updates per hour: 170K While the speed of selects or updates by the background crons was and is not important, the speed of selects run by the users on the same table was important. The easy solution was to cache the data so that the users could search domains at a good speed. The memory table just worked brilliantly as a cache. (I'm no mysql guru and its my first project where MyIsam did not work for me, so I know I definitely could do a better job of optimizing the Innodb table and Innodb settings in my.cnf)