Deprecated - Performance and scalability

Hi,

I am in the process of making online social network/community website... Basically similar to myspace.... I recently moved from shared hosting to VPS (obvious reasons). It is a Debian Etch3 box with 128 Mb RAM burstable to 256 mb..... That's for now, I will get additional 256 MB of RAM next month. I set up Apache/2.2.3 PHP/4, Mysql5, eAccelerator 0.9.5

What I am concerned mostly now is page execution time. First I thought mysql was slow, but now I am not sure.... For example, for the front page, I get:

Somehow I have my IP hard-coded in many of the links and images of the code.

F'rinstance:

http://64.x.x.x/files/images/Ibanez guitar.jpg" title="" class="thickbox" rel="pix">

This is causing things to load slowly and, obviously you want your links to all be relative (right?).

Hello I have had my site http://for-webmasters.info running problem free since 5x came out and even way before that in 4.7. But Now I have a problem.
Last time I added content to my site everything was fine, as I finished and logged out.

We are getting internal server errors (return codes of 500) for our site, but we can't figure out what is causing them. They can appear at any time, on any page, regardless of how many people are logged on to the site, what you are trying to do, or whether you are an anonymous user or logged in. Occasionally, we'll see this error in the Apache logs:

Premature end of script headers: /public_html/index.php

But never anything other than that -- which, again, does not appear every time we get a 500.

I'm sure most of us can admit that Drupal does not handle searches very well. It's actually quite embarrassing when I'm praising Drupal and showing it off to all my friends, when I have to sit here and wait upto a full minute when I run a search on Drupal.org.

One of my sites (http://hushedcasket.com running 4.7) has been on some major websites (and even a TV show) recently.

I've noticed that the stats for the site stop recording during times of heavy load.

Is this normal? I'm sure I don't have the stats module throttled.

Something else?