I am using lamp... running on SuSE w/ Apache2, MySQL, PHP5 on a box with 4xCPUs and 2GB of RAM... I'm talking about optimizing code. Problem looks like it might be with this MIME email class that I'm using... there is a function that takes a LONG time to execute. I use apache benchmark to stress test the box while running a profiler (xdebug) to see where the source of the problem might be...