I have installed a fresh installation of opencart on my linode. The linode is not hosting any other websites.

Still, opencart on my hostgator shared plan loads faster. Using http://whichloadsfaster.com/ to test, the hostgator opencart site loads from 20-to 50% faster every time.
I'm running cpanel on the linode, but as I said there is no traffic to the site, except my testing, so it doesn't have a lot of work to do.

What apache/php settings should I change to speed up the linode? I will not see a lot of traffic. I have done the optimization from the getting started/host a website guide.

# free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 496 405 90 0 10 148
-/+ buffers/cache: 246 249
Swap: 255 85 170


top - 04:40:12 up 6 days, 19 min, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.01, 0.05
Tasks: 122 total, 1 running, 121 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 0.0%us, 0.0%sy, 0.0%ni,100.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 508252k total, 416068k used, 92184k free, 10412k buffers
Swap: 262140k total, 87164k used, 174976k free, 152408k cached

Since Cpanel alone requires 512M minimum (1G preferred) is it any wonder your teeny tiny VPS is struggling to perform.

Lose the training wheels and I bet the performance will be vastly improved.

Anytime you're using swap, you have a fubar configed system - fix it and things will run much better (and without swap).

_________________
Either provide enough details for people to help, or sit back and listen to the crickets chirp.
Security thru obscurity is a myth - and really really annoying.

But I read the free -m commands as there is 249 free MB of ram. With no traffic, only one connection to one website, would cPanel still slow things down?

the hostgator site almost always loads slower the first time, but then get much quicker on reloads. This makes me think this has to do with caching.

<spam>

whichloadsfaster.com is for entertainment purposes only. Your Hostgator server and your current Linode are probably not hosted in the same datacenter, perhaps not even in the same state (country, continent). It may simply be a difference in latency that will make the site seem slower.

ADDED: Sorry, didn't notice this was an old thread; the spammer bumped it.

It has probably a lot to do with caching. If anyone is seeing issues like this, look into fragment caching, or put Varnish in front of your application server.

I did try whichloadsfaster from many different IP addressess/locations, even through a proxy on the linode server, and hostgator was faster even every time.

I started playing with settings and found that the biggest speed increase came when I moved from PHP 5.3.X which was the standard setting, to 5.4.X.
Moving to DSO handler also helped with speed. I am currently using mod_ruid2 with DSO and suexec, as this seems faster but should be equally secure as suphp, I have enabled eAccelerator for caching.
Linode is now faster than hostgator, especially on recurring pageloads.

I did try Ramnode which was again faster than hostgator, probably due to the SSD disks.

I think the above statement saying that the linode was slow because of having cPanel installed is not correct. cPanel itself doesn't use 500mb ram. cPanel recommends having at least 500mb ram to run a server with cpanel on. You can see from the free -m command above that the server had more than enough free ram.