help tuning a DB installation

[Jim]

Hi.  I'm wondering if anyone can help me tune this database so it runs 
better on my hardware.  I've made some attempts, but either they've made 
it worse or not changed anything.  Changing the database design itself 
has shown the most improvement, but I'd still like to know how to tune 
things on the db side.  I understand from the manual that "he two most 
important variables to configure are key_buffer_size and table_cache", 
but HOW to do this is another question.

The machine is a 1.2 GHz Celeron, with 512 MB of RAM and an IDE disk.
The database typically has about 40-50 open connections, most of them in 
state "Sleep", but with a few reads and writes, and two slaves 
replicating from it.

Top looks like this:
PID   USER   PRI  NI  SIZE  RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM   TIME CPU COMMAND
15899 mysql  26   10 45004  12M  3864 S N  35.1  2.4  98:58   0 mysqld
There is typically about 32M of swap being used by mysql.  I can see 
that the HD light is almost always on.

Here, finally, is the salient bit of the my.cnf file:
[mysqld]
port            = 3306
socket          = /tmp/mysql.sock
skip-locking
key_buffer         = 16K
max_allowed_packet = 1M
table_cache        = 4
sort_buffer_size   = 128K
net_buffer_length  = 2K
thread_stack       = 64K
set-variable       = max_connections=750
set-variable       = default-character-set=cp1251
log-bin
server-id          = 4
Thanks in advance for any advice.
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