But since traffic to my website has increased dramatically this year, I’ve been doing far more writes than reads and at peak times the load on the DBMS has become quite high.

For these reasons I’ve woken up three times this year to find that my MyISAM tables have locked up during the night as the server has tried to handle multiple, table-locking, I/O requests simultaneously. Being as blogs are database driven, my site effectively goes down until I login and repair the DB.

So I’m thinking of switching from MyISAM to InnoDB after what you said above about MVCC and row-level locking.

Cheers!