We recently re-deployed our SMC/SPA to an ESX virtual machine, the guest is Windows 2003 x64 with 4 cores and 8GB RAM, figuring the extra horsepower would help the stability and performance (which is did). After running the new system for several days and doing some analysis, we changed the innodb_buffer_pool_size setting in the my.ini file for MySQL from 800MB to 2048MB and restarted the services.

Immediatly the response time performance of using the SPA console improved by at least a 4x factor. There is no longer any delay switching between views in SPA. If you have the memory available and running SPA, I'd highly recommend dedicating the extra memory.

-Matt