So while it had my attention I decided a few tweaks were in order.
Tweak 1. More RAM
During general operations I had previously noticed MySQL had grabbed a substantial chunk of virtual memory and on a NAND based system this is not desirable. I am not sure how the memory was being used but seeing I am not using HDMI video I could reconfigure the Pi to use less video memory and give more back to user space applications.
In my case I copied '/boot/arm240_start.elf' to '/start.elf' which immediately gave me back a much needed extra 48M of RAM.
Tweak 2. Bump Up The Speed
I edited the '/boot/config.txt' file to enable CPU overclocking beginning at 800Mhz initially to see how that goes.
#uncomment to overclock the arm. 700 MHz is the default.
arm_freq=800
I like the raspberry coloured gear graphics I found so I may use this for all general configuration tweaking posts.
... Robert