I think you are going to have to bite the bullet on conversion to InnoDB sooner rather than later. The performance improvement you are going to see will likely be orders of magnitude. The longer you leave it, the more painful it is going to become.You could do it on a slave and then promote it, or you could do it with pt-online-schema-change.While MyISAM still has some very narrow niche uses, it really is way past time to retire it in any regular use.