I have a low end dedicated server, and I'm trying to see what performance tweaks I can use to squeeze extra performance. There isn't any real need to do this, but just wanted to see how much I can get from a minimal configuration.

I have 512MB of RAM, and a 2.4 GHz Celeron. The disk is IDE, not SATA.

I installed nginx, spawn-fcgi, and php5. I installed Wordpress with the Athualpa theme. I turned on the performance stats footer, which indicates how many queries and the processing time.

I started out with a rendering time of 0.6 seconds with 231 queries. I installed eAccelerator and this went down to about 0.3 seconds.

All programs were compiled from source, and the server is running FreeBSD 8.0. I compiled mysql server with the optimizations and static executable options.

Are there any other settings I can change to make the rendering time faster?

These links should help you out with software configuration:

http://phplens.com/phpeverywhere/tuning-apache-php
http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/

There's always something you can tweak :) A lot of the times though, it comes down to where you're experiencing problems. You should also check out the man pages for iostat, vmstat and mpstat for CPU, disk I/O and virtual memory statistics. This should shed some light onto which components of your system are bottlenecks.

Is this a wordpress site? Perhaps using the WP Super Cache plugin... used this on one of our site and substantially reduced the load on the db.

I have a low end dedicated server, and I'm trying to see what performance tweaks I can use to squeeze extra performance. There isn't any real need to do this, but just wanted to see how much I can get from a minimal configuration.

...

Are there any other settings I can change to make the rendering time faster?

Have you looked at the web pages themselves? That can make a huge difference.

If you can indicate the site address, people can point out any simple improvements that can be made.

One person running a large web site on high-performance dedicated servers was very, very surprised at the difference some simple web page tuning made.