hi all can you help me tweak my server for best performance please?

i won't post specs or what i need help with as i need to know first if this is the right place to ask and if people are willing to help.. if this isn't the right place/site then where do i get help?

This is a very wide area. There are work to be done on a lot of different areas.

In general I think there are 3 areas you need to look.
1 Does the server run unnecessary processes, daemons or services?
2 Is the software that you do need configured properly? There are customisations you can do with most software. On Gentoo we would compile and optimise the software specifically for the hardware the server has in addition to looking at the configuration of the software itself.
3 Is the hardware sufficent? CPU, memory, storage, network

I guess I would go through the server in that order.

Mons

1. not sure as far as i know it's has what a default ubuntu server 7.1 install has but how would i check if there are ones i don't need? (i have webmin if that makes it easier) also what are good ones to disable?

2. hmm not ure again i run ubuntu 7.1 not gentoo

3. specs are amd athlon 64 x2 4600+ 2.4ghz and 2gb ddr2 ram and i have an 250gb,500gb and a backup 40gb hard drive also network is 100mbits

some more info: i have 3+ sites on the server a forum, a php based site and an imageboard and a total of about 20k unique daily visitors and 19k of them are taken up by the image board and all sites use php and mysql

what i'd like is some good apache2/mysql settings/suggestions that will help and also some good accelerator/caching software i can use to speed things up atm i have just zend

Without specs and what you need help with there is no way we can answer your question.

We need to know what you intend to use the server for, what services you require running, what kind of admin interface you're using, etc, etc, etc.

i answered all your questions in my last post

You should find out what the server is running at the moment and for each service find out what it does. If you don't need it, switch it off. Get used to the command line utils and not rely so much on graphical tools. If it is a web pure server, you probably don't even need things like Gnome and X to be running.

On apache/mysql you probably have to find some books or something to help you. There are some out there. There are plenty of tweaks depending on what your site does.

It is not 1 setup that is right, you have to work on it and improve it gradually. It will take time.

Mons

don't want to sound rude but did you read my post? i said i have ubuntu 7.1 server meaning i have no GUI or desktop so i use nothing other then the command line with a tiny bit of webmin to make life easier/quicker when i'm at work

Sorry, never used any server distros, didn't now it didn't have a GUI.

Anyway, you still need to just list the services, daemons and processes running and make a judgement on if you need them. Also if you do need them, you need to find out if there are better performing alternatives or if you can confgure it better.

Specially with big ones like apache and mysql that will probably be a gradual process where you have to read and study the systems.

Another huge area is security. Systems like SELinux tend to take a lot of power, so you might have to consider if you can get good enough security with something lighter.

So you have your work cut out....

Mons