New Server
The great news is - I have put in a new server! Yay!
You should find page loads far more expedient now, the old server (a dual P-II 400MHz with 256MB RAM, slow SCSI disks) was really struggling to do all the things I have it doing, and I now have a (very noisy) HP Netserver LP-2000r (dual P-III 1GHz with 512MB RAM, fastish SCSI disks) serving up the pages.