Heres the deal. Drupal site averaging 5k hits daily but sometimes incurs huge spikes of trafic... Just moved to dedicated server, and is overrunning it. I know drupal has issues with connection strings and such but with the amount of traffic i get, this should not max out a dedicated server. Any ideas as what I can do to take the load off my server, my host thinks its a caching problem with php... please drupal experts only. add me to msn to chat: i will pay for work to be done to my server if need be.
To me it sounds like a database issue, but I have never worked with drupal on that scale so I would not be the right person to ask. I would suggest posting to the drupal forums as they will give a better response. They also have an IRC channel on freenode if you want real time responses.
As chickens has alluded to, it's not necessarily a drupal issue. When you get a dedicated server, it is usually not optimized for high traffic and loads and it's NOT like Ronco's Chicken spinnin' microwave where you set-it-and-forget-it... A server needs to be monitored and adjusted to deal with constant changes of your environment. Simply saying your server is over-run is not helpful, we need specifics Apache settings mysql settings and benchmarking so we can see what your server is doing