[BENCHMARK] Server Resources

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First let me apologize if this is not the appropriate forum for my question.
I thought it would be because the issue has to do with
apache/modperl/mysql performance.

We have recently added a site to our server which hosts 30 other sites.
The new site uses modperl & MySQL. After adding the new site, the server
we were on (shared server at a national server farm) had major resource
problems (too many connections & load avg up to 30 not infrequently) &
eventually crashed. We moved to a new dedicated server which gave us more
resources, but we're still experiencing intermittent sluggishness - load
avg approaching 10 - and this is before this new site really becomes
active. Maybe 20 logins per day currently - in 10 days we'll have ~ 4000.

I've made changes to Apache config, following suggestions in the mod_perl
performance tuning docs:
MinSpareServers 5
MaxSpareServers 10
MaxClients=75
MaxRequestsPerChild 500

I've made efforts to optimize the database & queries, and have made
changes to the my.cnf file following suggestions in the High Performance
MySQL O'Reilly book & a couple of postings that seemed to have some
similarity to our situation:
set-variable = key_buffer_size=128M
set-variable = table_cache=1024
set-variable = join_buffer=1M
set-variable = sort_buffer=2M
set-variable = record_buffer=1M
set-variable = wait_timeout=20
set-variable = thread_cache=8

But before I go any further with testing & modifying configurations &
perhaps code, I'd like to have some good idea that the server we currently
are running on should be able to handle this new site & the 30 others - 2
running WebGUI, 12 use MySQL (4-5 fairly heavily), 4 modperl.

The server is a Pentium 3 800 MHz with 768M RAM (of which we can use ~640,
according to the server sysadmin)

It's running Ensim 4.0 with Fedora Core 1 with Embedded Perl version
v5.8.1 for Apache/1.3.31 (Unix) (Red-Hat/Linux) mod_perl/1.29 PHP/4.3.8
FrontPage/5.0.2.2635 mod_ssl/2.8.18 OpenSSL/0.9.7a
MySQL version 3.23.58

Any constructive suggestions are very welcome.

Thanks.

Sys