Sorry for double post but I wanted this separated from the above for easy reading:
I really recommend litespeed. I have used it for over a year and have enjoyed the performance gains and the fact that I am able to get away with using slightly less powerful hardware for my loads. You can find more information here:
http://www.litespeedtech.com/litespeed-vs-apache.html
Another option may be to invest in a better form of RAID in order to also increase your I/O performance. You should try to generate some logs to see how stressed your disk is and if it is under heavy load you may want to add more drives to spread it out. Running even a 3 drive RAID 5 would go a long way to increasing I/O performance and also providing you with some data redundancy.
In addition file fragmentation could also be an issue for high loads and you can take care of that by getting something like diskeeper to reduce the development of fragmentation and to provide automated defragmentation of the drive at preset time intervals.
If your not already you should be trying to log your cpu and ram usage to help identify bottle necks. Your Server Load Averages should not be above 2 in ideal conditions to avoid lag or instability. 3 and above is an indication that problems are coming soon if you do not increase your specs. You can find a bit more information here:
http://www.crucialp.com/resources/tu...linux-unix.php
I must admit that I find it a bit funny that the mighty programmer BAILOPAN does not know much about how to run a web server.
You can also find out more about the importance of disc I/O here (I have not actually read it):
http://nathanaeljones.com/153/perfor...iller-disk-io/
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