I've installed Webmin on my Debian Sarge 3.1 server. Before, the server had Apache2, PHP5, ProFTPd and MySQL all running fine.

I installed Webmin via apt-get and then ugraded from the Webmin website to the latest version. As soon as I did this I noticed that the Apache2 webserver, or more specifically the TorrentFlux web interface, slowed down to a crawl. The only way to load the page now is to wait until the progress bar reaches 25 % (about 2 minutes after loading the page ) and then click cancel action which displays enough of the page to work from.

The problem only started once Webmin was installed. Is there another (free) alternative to Webmin that I can use or have I done something wrong by upgrading etc ?

For several reasons, webmin has been pulled from debian, after sarge .
I recommend installing it from original install, the one of webmin site.
The install process works very nice on debian.

So should I doenload the tar.gz or the .deb file to install. I would guess the .deb file but others have told be to get the tarball and install it from that.

Either that, or is there another program I could use, given that Webmin has now been pulled from Debian ?

i used the tarball and worked fine .
If there is a .deb package, better then .

Used the .deb file. Seems to work fine now. A lot better than the apt-get version anyway.