Ever notice how people that know little but have a bigger ego can manage to woo people into thinking they are smarter than they really are? I had the pleasure of working with some people (not from my company) that get paid at times more than $200 an hour to play with their expensive toys. I was asked to help this guy study one of our servers because a few people had complained about the speed. We spent 2 hours setting up his expensive fluke meters and network taps in order for him to do a simple network packet sniff. Then we spent an hour waiting for him to figure out what he did wrong. Once he got it working he was only able to tell us what we already knew about the speed... It wasn't our server's problem. It seems that 90% of a consultants job must be the perception they create for their clients. Guess I'll never make a very good consultant. I'm not good at smoke and mirrors.

On a much better note, if anyone reading this is using PHP, upgrade to 4.0.2! All the problems I'd previously reported have gone away, and the speed has increased a bit.