I just signed up for dedicated hosting services.
I needed better database performance than my shared host could offer.

To my surprise, the identical web pages executing sql queries took 2 to 3 times longer to run on the dedicated host.

I realize there are many factors involved in performance.
I was assured the hardware would meet my needs.

Apparently, the default MySQL installation is far from being optimized.
Any suggestions what I can do to improve this?

Thanks

Have you taken this up with your hosting company? Assuming that your new dedicated hosting account is with the same company where you earlier had a shared hosting service, one would expect that they would be able to shed some light on the matter and, in fact, resolve the issue.

Actually, it is not the same company since my old host did not offer dedicated hosting.

With that being said, which is more important over all for traffic to the SQL database? Bandwidth or CPU?