Site running slower than usual

I run an IPB 2.3.x board and lately my forum has been slowing down to crawl. I don't think it's a server problem because the dreamhoststatus site doesn't say anything about my server at all. It has been receiving a bit more traffic than usual but it's no where near the size of bigger boards, the board only has about 20,000 posts so it's not big. If it's a problem because of the 'high traffic' I'm getting to my site, then I'm a bit disappointed with Dreamhost... any other culprits to the slow crawling of my site?

Do you allow the upload of images, avatars, rich media, etc.? URL?


-- si-blog --

Only avatars and images. But that doesn't take up a lot of space.

And I noticed it only slows down at peak hours... so I think that might be the culprit.

In reply to:

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Only avatars and images. But that doesn't take up a lot of space.

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But they do take up a lot of bandwidth, and also use CPU resources. Uploading images is fairly memory-intensive, and images of any kind usually necessitate making lots of extra HTTP connections (local or remotely-sourced). Speed problems are almost always related to bandwidth.


-- si-blog --

Have you logged into your server using SSH and seen what's going on with "top"?