status.php results and questions

[Mayhem30]

SMF Version: SMF 1.1.4
Here are the results. How do I solve the issues that are in bold?

MySQL Statistics
MySQL 3.23.x
Connections per second:  0.202 
Kilobytes received per second:  0.0965 
Kilobytes sent per second:  0.098 
Queries per second:  6.5165 
Percentage of slow queries:  0 

Opened vs. Open tables:
(table_cache)  2164.4219 (should be <= 80)  

Table cache usage:
(table_cache)  1 (should be >= 0.5 and <= 0.9) 
Key buffer read hit rate:
(key_buffer_size)  0.0135 (should be <= 0.01) 
Key buffer write hit rate:
(key_buffer_size)  0.583 (should be <= 0.5) 

Thread cache hit rate:
(thread_cache_size)  1 (should be >= 30 )  

Thread cache usage:
(thread_cache_size)  0 (should be >= 0.7 and <= 0.9)  

Temporary table disk usage:
(tmp_table_size)  0.4226 (should be <= 0.5) 
Sort merge pass rate:
(sort_buffer)  0 (should be <= 0.001) 
Query cache enabled:
(query_cache_type)  0 (should be >= 1 and <= 1) 

[Mayhem30]

bump

[JayBachatero]

First thing first.  I suggest that you upgrade MySQL.  Are you on a shared host?  If so then you won't be able to make any changes to the my.cnf file to change those values.  If you are in a shared host you can ask your host to see if they can upgrade MySQL and hope that they upgrade it.

[Mayhem30]

I'm on a unmanaged dedicated server.

If I upgrade the MySQL server, won't I lose all the databases?

[JayBachatero]

No you wont.  http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/upgrade.html.  Also there are a few tutorials in google on how to do this.