We run virtual appliance with 8gb RAM, and we have increase these two settings on my.cnf
innodb_additional_mem_pool_size=16M
innodb_buffer_pool_size=512M
You can read up on them and see if that makes sense to you.
We also are a little paranoid with DB connections, so we also tweak the MySQL configuration and the create slave scripts to make use to SSL certificates.
[mysqld]
ssl
ssl-ca=/opt/SecureSpan/mysql-ssl/cacert.pem
ssl-cert=/opt/SecureSpan/mysql-ssl/dc01db.pem
ssl-key=/opt/SecureSpan/mysql-ssl/dc01db.key
ssl-cipher=AES128-SHA:DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA
[client]
ssl
ssl-ca=/opt/SecureSpan/mysql-ssl/cacert.pem
ssl-cert=/opt/SecureSpan/mysql-ssl/dc01db.pem
ssl-key=/opt/SecureSpan/mysql-ssl/dc01db.key
ssl-cipher=AES128-SHA:DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA
And similarly on the JDBC connections we added useSSL=true