I have little experience with web server management outside of IIS, so I'm looking for some help here. The server hosts a relatively light-weight PHP website for a school so it doesn't receive a ton of traffic. Additionally it hosts an installation of Moodle.

The server specs:
Intel Xeon 1.86Ghz Dual Core
4GB of memory
Server 2003 SP2
Apache 2.2
MySQL5
PHP5

The website is pretty much slow a lot of times throughout the day. I don't know whether it's Apache or MySQL causing it. Is there some sort of monitoring I can perform to see what's bogging the server down? Any pointers at all?

Thanks.

Best thing to do would be to login as root through SSH and run a top command. By that, I mean just simply type the word top.

Copy the first 10 or so processes and post them here and ill be able to tell you what's using most of your CPU. If you can, do it when your experiencing these slow downs.

Edit: Forgot your running Server 2003. Doubt any of the above will work on that platform. Also, i've never touched Windows servers so can't really help.

Run taskmgr and check what is eating all your memory or cpu.

I've monitored the task manager and haven't seen CPU usage go over 15%, with tons of memory available (2-3+ GB).

Is it possible that something in php.ini or my MySQL config file is restricting something?

Get phpmyadmin, look at the mysql stats and tune my.cnf accordingly.

Apache has stock configuration?

PM me a link to a site hosted on the box thats slow, I'll let you know what it is. (httpd/mysqld)

Bit the bullet and played with Debian on an old laptop the past couple of days. I have a good installation of Debian (etch) + Apache2 + PHP5 + MySQL5 + SSH + VSFTPD with multiple sites configured on Apache already. I stuck my website on it and all is good, so I'm going to switch this laptop out with the live server on Monday and put Debian on it. Hopefully that'll help, and at the very least it gives me new toys.

So far working great. This thing is as fast as I blink now =D