Two more tips:

1. Use FreeBSD, not Linux; and if you must use Linux, benchmark the performance of new kernels before you upgrade to them: http://people.freebsd.org/~kris/scaling/os-mysql.pdf

2. Use PostgreSQL, not MySQL: http://people.freebsd.org/~kris/scaling/os-pgsql.pdf (compare vs. the mysql graph -- pgsql maxes out at about 30% more transactions per second).

If this is all you have to show for 6 months of "combing Google", then you've wasted a lot of time.

The second one is not accurate. mysqldump has many options and locking the tables is optional.