Alright, this has been an adventure, especially since I am not really intelligent when it comes to the inner workings of these matters. I'm setting up two Linodes, one app server the other a sql server, which I will be running a small social network on. I've installed MySQL on my 512, but now I need to tune it for optimal performance as a standalone server. Looking at my.cnf is over my head, so can someone give me a sample config for MySQL or at least point me in the right direction for my specific resources?

You should be able to find examples in something like /usr/share/doc/mysql-server-5.1/examples

The correct file for a 512MB server that runs primarily MySQL is my-large.cnf. IMO, there's little value in tweaking MySQL beyond picking the right example config file. Some people like to disable certain storage engines to save some RAM.

Thanks for that. I haven't been able to test things yet, but at least got the cnf taken care of.