Hey Alex, Hrrmm.. interesting RE swap. My reading in the past regarding swap seems to be not to starve the machine on it or stuff just dies rather than slows down.. it's something to keep in mind though. In the interim I ran "show processlist" a few times, and when I caught a query, I checked that the table it was running that query against had indexes, which they did.. but more than queries I often saw "COMMIT". I seem to have been able to improve performance by: * Setting innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit = 0 * Removing a few Add-ons from Firefox :D The first fixed the disk thrashing (it seemed to be doing SQL COMMITs multiple times per second which was triggering filesystem syncs which resulted in a lot of disk crunching. With this setting change, it'll only sync at most every 1 second.. Potentially lose a second's worth of data, but given the only purpose for the MySQL database in this case is XBMC metadata + tt-rss feeds, I think I'll live :) The second was because as I arrowed through different posts, I noticed that the disk was a LOT quieter, but things were still sluggish. Running top showed Firefox peg at 100% on its given core. Wasn't using Firebug and a few other tweak tools, so I pulled them out. Either way, thanks for the tt-rss suggestion! It looks pretty slick, hasn't segfaulted yet :) and if I can secure my install appropriately, the mobile app looks like it could be nice. Anthony