The server running this site is a the most basic virtual server available running at Slicehost.com.  I recently rebuilt the slice from CentOS to an Ubuntu distribution for the hell of it. But since then, I have found things a little slower than before, especially with WordPress.  I needed a fix.

On investigation, I discovered Apache was using most of my available memory and pushing the server to capacity.  With help from some of the Slicehost documentation I discovered the difference between apache2-mpm-prefork and apache2-mpm-worker and their configurations. But how to switch from one to the other was not so obvious, until I found this article at PHP hints.  In short, I needed to install Apache again with mpm_worker, and install PHP as a FastCGI module. (Ubuntu makes this all so easy with apt-get install). Apparently this is not the recommended way to run PHP for production servers, but then neither is running your server with 256M of RAM. So there you are. My memory usage is down enough for things to run a little faster around here (for the time being, but an upgrade to more memory is on the cards).