Many of the traditional hardware upgrades can help MySQL perform better. For example, adding memory to your system gives you more memory to allocate to MySQL caches and buffers. Upgrading to faster disks will improve I/O speed.

Intelligently distributing your databases across multiple physical devices can also help. For example, placing your data files and index files on different disks can improve performance.

Static binaries are faster than dynamic binaries. You can configure MySQL to link statically instead of dynamically when you build it.