WordPress maxing out server, slowing website

Group,

Over the last two days I have been trying to figure out my problem on my own. I am porting over a static blog into WordPress for the first time and this is the first issue I have run into.

Here is the website address, before I forget;

http://www.rotheblog.com/wpblog/

I don’t have an exact time when this started happening, it just seems to have begun without ryhme or reason. I have about 650 posts so far, 530 or so of them in one category. I have read this isn’t a huge blog by any means, so hopefully the post amount isn’t an issue.

These are the things I have tried so far from reading other posts in the forums under “slow” like many moderators suggest.

I have done a simple upgrade (file replacement) from WP 2.2.1 to 2.2.2

I disabled the count calculation on the archive posts (thinking maybe it had to do too much work to do those calcs)

I then disabled the archives altogether, since there are alot of posts dating back from 2004 (thinking maybe too many to list)

I then disabled my four plugins and checked to see if that helped.

I then installed WP-Cache to see if that would help

Then I did a full deleting and reuploading of my WP 2.2.2 install, keeping basically only my config.php and .htaccess files.

Nothing seems to help. From my hosts end, my website started on a server that was shared with 267 other virtual domains. Then it was switched to a box with only one other website, and then it was switched to a dual xenon box all by itself. Each time it still crashes the server.

Looking in my log files, this seems to be the problem. I keep getting a looping request for two of my categories, the aforementioned one with 530 posts in it, and one category with around 40 posts in it. Here are the lines;

[09/Aug/2007:08:46:09 -0400] “GET /wpblog/?cat=63& HTTP/1.0” 200 25446 “-” “WordPress/”

[09/Aug/2007:08:46:12 -0400] “GET /wpblog/?cat=56& HTTP/1.0” 200 31000 “-” “WordPress/”

My host says he has worked with me as much as he can, and told me that he has to start putting other websites on this box. He says I have 24-48 hours before it goes offline.

I am not a programmer, so I need some help. I was going to try other things in other posts, but I have run out of time. I know there are some things I can check with him in how apache might be configed….but I was hoping someone out there might look at this, know right away what it was and help me make a simple change that would save me a lot of headache.

Thanks so much for the help in advance, and I hope some of you will have some time to figure this out even though it seems to retread a repeated topic of “slow” once again.