1. All static files are being served by S3.  My server is set to redirect any requests to static files (like the widget) to the file on S3.  This means that if RSSmeme slows down and you have the widget installed; your site will not be affected.  Occasionaly S3 has a breakdown; if you are concerned with that affecting your site then please install the FeedBurner FeedFlare instead.  It is just as easy and the only way it will slow your site is if FeedBurner’s servers slow down (which I find highly unlikely).
2. The real culprit here wasn’t entirely static files.  It was FriendFeed Stats.  The global statistics page was tying up an apache process for a long time while it calculated the results.  My server doesn’t have much memory so stealing an apache process is a very big deal.  Imagine 10 of you hitting the same global FriendFeed Stats page with an unprimed cache?  All of my apache processes get stuck, other users get angry, and chaos ensues.  So I’ve disabled the global statistics pages.  All user specific pages will continue to work.
3. Over 250 different IPs (all requesting bogus URLs clearly trying to get access to my server) have been dropped using iptables.  I still need to figure out a better way to automate this process.  I think if an IP frequently requests a URL that results in a 404 then we can safely drop them instead of wasting time processing their requests.

Again; I’m sorry!  But things are much better now.

sudo aptitude install apache2

Most of the time it isn’t that they have terrible database indexing.  It isn’t even that they aren’t caching anything.  The problem is that they keep the Ubuntu apache default settings which spawns over 100 server processes.  Each one takes up at least 15MB and brings the server down to it’s knees.  As soon as your server starts swapping it’s performance is going to take a nose dive.  So let’s reduce the number of processes apache spawns:

sudoedit /etc/apache2/apache2.conf

And search for this section and make these changes (assuming you are using the default prefork module):

<IfModule mpm_prefork_module>
    StartServers          2
    MinSpareServers       2
    MaxSpareServers       4
    MaxClients            4
    MaxRequestsPerChild   250
</IfModule>

That is a good place to start; everyone will have to tweak these as necessary but for a 256MB slice it should work well.  It tells apache to start with 2 processes, allow between 2 and 4 processes to idle, run a maximum of 4 processes, and to restart a process after it serves 250 requests (which is like a get out of jail free card if you are leaking memory).  Note that this does not mean that you can only handle 4 users at a time.  It means you can handle 4 requests at a time and any other requests are queued up.  Watch your memory usage (using top or free) and tweak these numbers as necessary.

There are other easy fixes that I won’t get into:

• Use a separate media server (S3 maybe) and turn KeepAlive off for your dynamic server.
• Use memcached to cache anything and everything.
• Reorganize your database.  In mysql try to avoid using blobs if possible.  If you need them then move them off to their own table because mysql cannot cache columns with variable length.  This was RSSmeme’s problem; a database reorganization that took 5 minutes resulted in complex queries taking .01 sec instead of 5 sec.
• Fine tune your database.  Depending on your app you might consider modifying query_cache_size, sort_buffer_size, key_buffer, tmp_table_size, and table_cache.  Removing innodb support (if you don’t need it) will save you an easy 10MB.

And please take everything you read on the internet about fine tuning your VPS with a grain of salt; including this.  I do not consider myself an expert at this; I’m far from it.  I could be very wrong and this could be terrible for your needs.  The point is that you need to put just a little bit of effort into setting up VPS.  Good luck!

If you have control of your server it’s as simple as setting a redirect from your current feed to your Feedburner feed.  Here’s how:

1. Point Feedburner to /wordpress/wp-rss2.php NOT to /feed.  If you point FeedBurner to /feed then you’ll enter a recursive loop of redirects.  Whoops!
2. Look for a file called .htaccess at the root directory for your site.  It is a hidden file so you have to pass the ‘-a’ flag to ls to see it.  I have no clue how to see hidden files on windows.
3. Most likely you can place the following line at the very top of your .htaccess file.  You want this redirect to happen before anything else in the file.  In my case, I actually had a redirect from anything www to no www, so I wanted that to happen BEFORE redirecting to the feed, so I placed this redirect below the www redirect:
   

   Redirect /feed http://feeds.feedburner.com/benjamingolub

   That will do a 302 (temporary) redirect from my Wordpress feed to my FeedBurner feed.

Any software that’s any good will follow that redirect and grab entries from FeedBurner without any user intervention.  Now I can collect some statistics!