Drupal Performance on SliceHost with Boost Module

If you know me, you know that I work on a lot of Drupal sites. You might also know that SliceHost (now a part of RackSpace) is one of the most affordable and simple VPS hosting solutions out there. That said, you might not know that I run several of my own Drupal sites on a single SliceHost 256 slice (256mb ram, that is).

Since I put up my personal blog site using Drupal on a slice, I've noticed that the site, despite being very straightforward as far as Drupal sites go, was not performing very well (3-5 second page loads were common, 400-500ms before initial HTTP response codes). So, I decided to take a closer look to determine what was going on and try to resolve the performance issue.