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About 5 million pageviews / month. The website is quite processing intensive.

That's only two pageviews a second, on average.

We can agree that traffic rarely comes in at an average rate.

Assuming the standard bell curve it's six pageviews a second, at peak.

And that's apparently spread across four read-only slaves, too. I'm more inclined to blame the code than the database in this case.

No, it is not the code. It is InnoDB's default buffer pool set to 8MB that cause my website to be so slow ...