[ale] apache/linux performance tuning [long]

[djinn]

Another weird question for you guys in ale land...

<background>
My company is in a rather bitter struggle with the parent company of our
main client for control of their web site.  Their parent company bought
into Keynote to compare the site we host with ones they (parent company)
hosts...and (shock, surprise) we measure up very poorly.

I had an interesting discussion with a non-sales Keynote person, looking
at the pretty charts and graphs they provide, and it seems that our
network performance is about the same as our Sworn Enemy's, but the time
from the first GET request to the delivery is really laggy.  In other
words, we ping just fine but god forbid you request something of the web
server.
</background>

Our setup may be partially at fault...there's a router in front and then
a firewall/NAT box hiding the web server.  The NAT machine handles
firewalling, NAT, and stateful inspection of packets.  The web server
isn't terribly heavily hit...less than 600,000 actual requests per day,
most between 8 and 8pm EST.  

All of these machines are running a very stripped RH 7.1. The web server
is a PIII 1ghz with 1GB RAM.  The NAT machine is an AMD 550 with 512 MB
RAM.  The router is an AMD 450 with 512MB RAM.  The read/write speed
(we're talking about laggy GET requests now) shouldn't be at
fault...they're 10,000RPM SCSI drives.  I'm using ext2, if that makes
any difference. 

I really don't know what to do.  My pride is hurting pretty badly
because it *appears* (and I know about lies, damned lies, and
statistics) that MSIE on NT4.0 is serving up pages faster than my linux
box with apache!  

Any pointers to performance tuning (apache or linux), suggestions on
what could be wrong...please help.  Could it be that NAT/stateful
inspection is causing bottlenecks on the return?  Could it be that I
need to tune apache somehow? Could it be resource limits for the
non-root user Apache is running?  

TIA
jenn
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