This is all fixed now, for those that stumble across this posting. This was escalated to a professional engagement with mysqlperformanceblog consulting, when Vadim quickly noticed that innodb settings go in the [mysqld] section, not the [mysql.server] section. Of course I didn’t include that part in my original post… Now the db is using 10G for its buffer_pool cache and disk reads are in the 0-50 per second range. Thanks Speeple and especially Vadim.