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I moved a db from a personal machine to a VPS, mariadb to mysql, and now -

select count(*) from table_name;

calls are taking like 9 seconds.

Also a lot of other calls that used to take like 0.5 seconds now take 10. They're all calls that are under an index...

Can anyone please tell do you know are there any settings that are likely to alleviate this? I'm finding it hard to believe just 2.5 million records are causing this much slow down just because it's a VPS (4 gb ram, 2 cpus, should be respectable enough hd access)?