I've been reading about website performance and have altered bandwidth and block caching settings per the instructions on pg 295-6 of Drupal 6 book. I also enabled and configured the Throttle module per instructions on pg 297-8, including enabling Throttle on the Who's New and VirgiBlog blocks.

The author suggested the following information for optimizing server performance:

http://drupal.org/node/2601

I'm documenting this in case we need it for the new server.