I originally setup Mutable Times to use a remote MySQL database, but even with some pretty fat pipes thanks to FIOS, the performance was almost unbearable.
I moved the Mutable Times install to a server with a 100Mbit connection to the MySQL database and the performance difference is phenomenal.
My guess is that the perl MySQL driver configuration I tried was not optimized for a remote database. Oh well, no big deal.
The fcgid setup works great on both setups though.