I'm at a loss at this point. The server's been hit with higher loads than this and survived fine. It's running Wordpress on Apache on a 512MB slice, there's no reason it should be this slow. Just rebooted it and it's still slow.
If you want to help me debug it, my AIM username is the same as my HN one.
Wordpress can't do it by itself, it can't configure the webserver, and if you meant loading and serving the file by itself - it still means using a heavy php process instead letting the webserver serve a few bytes of disk (which they are always great at doing).
Yea I saw he was using apache, but I thought I may as well try to lead him to the dark side :)
Make sure it's not swapping. Protect yourself against CGI-related memory leaks by making MaxRequestsPerChild small but non-zero. Revert any changes you made to various Apache limits (esp. thread or socket related) before the problem began. Turn off any other services.
If you want to help me debug it, my AIM username is the same as my HN one.