First of all, I consider myself more a programmer than a servers guy. I have a website where I receive about 3,000 visits per day, which I think is a lot less than the max capacity for a dedicated server.

However, I've noticed that the connection to the website is pretty slow, e.g., to load images, to connect to it via SSH, etc.

I configured .httaccess recently to avoid hotlinking to images in my server (i.e. .jpg, .gif and .png), and I was wondering if that could be slowing down my website.

This is the configuration that I have:

# BEGIN WordPress

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.mysite.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.mysite.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|bmp|swf)$ http://www.google.com/ [R,NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

I found some code to do that in google, and I just copied to .htacces since I'm not an expert in apache. It works, but I don't know if that is the best way to do it.

How can I see if that is the reason why the server is slow? Are there any tools to monitor it? What would you do guys?

Thanks in advance!