I have a problem, which is: My websites (a #Wordpress site and a #MediaWiki installation) are slow as hell.

So I need to identify the cause. The problem is that I don't know nearly as much about website administration as I ought to be.

I contacted the support people at my website provider, who looked at my (Apache) logs and suggested that my Wordpress site might suffer from a "pingback xmlrpc attack". I did the proposed remedy, which made things a little better. But I don't know enough about reading website logs to identify such problems myself, which I ought to.

So what I am trying to say is: Is there some kind of beginners guide for reading website logs, identifying malicious traffic, and what to do about it?