Performance settings for MyISAM tables - keep everything in memory I have a 8-core MySQL server with 32 GB of RAM, holding 40 MyISAM tables (total: ~4GB of data).
Since the databases size is several times smaller than the available memory, how can I make full usage of my server's resources?


What settings should I attempt configure in my.cnf?
Can I force data + indexes to stay in memory?
MySQL only caches the indexes in MySQL's memory, not the data.  The data is only cached by the underlying operating system's filesystem caches.  The most important value to tune in my.cnf is key_buffer_size which will allocate memory for MyISAM to cache indexes.  

However, unless you have some specific reason for using MyISAM tables you should  convert those tables to InnoDB.  In this day and age, there are less than a handful of reasons to use use MyISAM and MyISAM is not good for concurrency, data integrity, or crash recovery.

If you switch to InnoDB, the most important setting is innodb_buffer_pool_size which is the internal memory cache that will cache data pages &amp; indexes.  Other things to consider are the innodb_log_file_size and make sure to set innodb_file_per_table=1.  With 4GB of data+indexes, setting  innodb_buffer_pool_size=4G is reasonable.  If you are running in a highly concurrent environment, you could experiment with values for innodb_thread_concurrency.  My recommendation is to start with innodb_thread_concurrency=0, but you might find it necessary to explicitly set it to be somewhere between 4-8 depending on your workload and version of MySQL.