okkare wrote:But I'm wondering if you can give any more information about the my.cnf file, what I should and should not change etc.
Not really, as I did say experiment - I have no way of knowing what is causing your issues.
Just keep in mind you are on an limited bandwidth resource with the Shaw cable and you are not in a dedicated server data center, so if a 1000 people connected on the same cable are running servers from home and a good percentage of those servers are busy then the cable will automatically start sharing out resources and this may be another cause of your issues.
There are free hosting companies and there are very cheap hosting companies who's servers are in a dedicated hosting data center and who's resources are usually very large and so you may have to give up the idea of running a busy server from home and go with a dedicated hosting service for reliability and the speed you require.
This section in my.cnf has many tweaks to experiment with:
key_buffer = 16M
max_allowed_packet = 1M
table_cache = 64
sort_buffer_size = 512K
net_buffer_length = 8K
read_buffer_size = 256K
read_rnd_buffer_size = 512K
myisam_sort_buffer_size = 8M
Also this section:
innodb_data_home_dir = "C:/xampp2/mysql/data"
innodb_data_file_path = ibdata1:10M:autoextend
innodb_log_group_home_dir = "C:/xampp2/mysql/data"
#innodb_log_arch_dir = "C:/xampp2/mysql/data"
## You can set .._buffer_pool_size up to 50 - 80 %
## of RAM but beware of setting memory usage too high
innodb_buffer_pool_size = 16M
innodb_additional_mem_pool_size = 2M
## Set .._log_file_size to 25 % of buffer pool size
innodb_log_file_size = 5M
innodb_log_buffer_size = 8M
innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit = 1
innodb_lock_wait_timeout = 50
Another good location for your questions is at the Magento shop forum and explain your issues and see if others using it have come up with some performance tweaks.