Run "top" from the shell to see which possesses that uses your CPU and memory.
If it is the gallery spiders, or others processes that don?t have to response fast to user requests, that slows the box down, try running they with "nice" (
http://wwwhahahahahahagroup.org/onli.../xcu/nice.html) to reduce they system scheduling priority.
By using nice the posses will run as quickly as it can, but will wait for other processes with a higher priority number. In effect, the posses will only use the spare resources of the box. Sow thing like the webserver gets priority.