Looking for recommendations for "perfect" server configuration for Joomla site

[SludgeMeister]

Hello all,

I'm hoping to gain some recommendations on the best configurations for my server. I've spent a great deal of time reading threads from this and other forums and am a little confused as to what the "best" solution would be for me.

I currently host a Joomla site. The site is a location review site which permits users to add a hotel and write a review, rate, comment, upload photos etc.

At the moment the site does not get a huge amount of traffic - Around 1000 unique visits a day (but this is growing). However, the site has been sluggish. Delays with initially loading the front page, delays in loading other pages throughout the site and generally less than perfect speed.

I have spent a great deal of time optimizing the CMS/Design/Code itself and at one point hired an admin to configure some caching at server level for me but this only improved things marginally (he configured xCache primarily).

I recently moved from the VPS I was using to host this site ( 3.0Ghz, 2GB RAM (+ 2GB SWAP), 70GB Raid10 space VPS) to a dedicated server (Q9550 quad core 2.83ghz / 8GB RAM - running WHM/Cpanel) as I took advantage of some black friday deals and got a better spec system for less than I was paying for the VPS!

What I am after are some recommendations from people who have experience in the optimisation field.

I currently have a brand new server with nothing but WHM/Cpanel loaded so am in the position to change Apache out for something else or indeed recompile Apache with whatever modules, the same with PHP.

I have looked at lightspeed, lighttpd, nginx and various Apache configurations (fastcgi, dso etc.) and a host of php caches and I am lost as to what would really be the best solution/combination for me, someone who hosts a Joomla (dynamic) site with lots of user interaction and a rapid increase in usage.

If someone would be kind enough to offer some suggestions I'd be really grateful.

Thanks

[GaryT]

In your case just for one site I would go for the boost function, Its basicy fast_cgi / Mod_fcgi, and Nginx.

And thats some machine for 1 Jooluma website lol - It should load extremely fast !

[Tearabite]

I dont use Joomla, but i do have a Drupal site that gets 10,000-25,000 uniques per day and I went through the same thing you did with performance.

These are some of the things i did:
Optimized MySQL
Installed a PHP accelerator/cache (eAccelerator) - made a HUGH difference
Use file-based caching to create HTML files of dynamic pages so that the database isnt hit for every page load (there is a Drupal module for this)

Doing these things i've been able to lower my page-loads from ~4-6 seconds down to ~1-2 seconds..

[GaryT]

eAccelerator can also increase cached files and loads, You would probably benefit with memcached.

[Infopro]

...And thats some machine for 1 Jooluma website lol - It should load extremely fast !

Indeed. It sounds to me like it's not the hardware but the software running the site that's the slow down. Keep in mind if your users are uploading files to the server you will benefit from SuPHP (which means some of these suggestions above may be of no use).

Tearabite's suggestions are good and will help, but my bet is on the site itself or some modules installed that's causing the sluggishness.