The site requires too many resources in a number of areas. The number one issue I see is there are way too many joins with out indexes required and this kills the database performance! Ideally there would be NO joins without indexes. This is just poor table layout and script design. The second issues that comes to mind is the way everything is broken down. Code reuse is great but all those includes add overhead for the web server. The number of javascript and css files (27) that must be downloaded see more is also an issues for the server and the clients. A default install of Dolphin 6.1.4 gives a 'Yahoo Performance Grade: F(39)' you can run this test on your own sites by downloading the YSlow plugin for FireFox... Its just sad that a 2 x 3.06Ghz server with 4GB of RAM and 6x 10K RPM SCSI drives with optimized mysql and php using eAccelerator I can only serve about 20 pages per second when testing the home page. The same server can server over 1200 'hello world' test pages per second! Anyway... Rant over.