Dedicated Server Is Slower than Shared Server Was

I have a website hosted by Crystaltech. I just moved the site from a
shared server to a dedicated server, and the site has slowed down. Can
anyone can give me advice on how to configure the server and improve
the speed?

I do not know how to confirm this, but my impression is that there is a
delay before the server starts serving each page. Once it starts
serving a page, it feeds it out very quickly (just as fast as the
shared server did -- faster if I turn on compression.) The delay can be
anywhere from 0 to 15 seconds, and it seems to correlate loosely with
the length of time since the page was last served.

I should mention that the site is written in ASP with a moderate amount
of database processing. It is a development site, so there is no
traffic. The server is running Windows 2003 with a 1.8GHz Celeron
Processor. (This is CrystalTech's bottom-of-the-line server. I'm
willing to upgrade to a faster server if that will help, but at this
point I'm not sure the server speed has anything to do with the
problem.)

All advice is appreciated.


-TC

William,

I have solved my speed problem. It was due to Windows authentication. I
was using "Integrated Windows Authentication". Apparently, this is
extremely slow. I have now switched to "Basic Authentication", which is
much faster.

-Todd

William,

Yes, I realize I must be careful. I have created a user account with
restricted privileges and I am insisting that account must be the only
account used to browse the website.

-TC