I just got 8 seconds.
You post table or traffic aren't large enough for things to be that slow.
You can go into you phpmyadmin panel and see what the overhead is for your tables and optimize. But it would have to be pretty large. I can't really think of any good explanations why it would be that slow. We were on dreamhost shared with a board much larger and way more traffic w/o problems.
On dreamhost shared your web is on one shared server and mysql is on another. I know there is a disconnect between the two groups there that handle support for each, so you might try to pin them down and ask specifically what it is because you can't find anything on your end.
I'd ask them if they can give you a slow queries output if they say you are hitting the memory limit. Or are you hitting the limit on the webserver?
