WordPress site is sloooow, but admin is fast….any ideas?

Not much information to go on… Start with elimination – disable the plugins, switch to default (or better – blank) theme. If it gets better – just find code at fault. If you are down to the bare and clean WP core and still having the issue – likely you have some server configuration issue.

Since you have considerable control over server you can also hook up some PHP profiler and try to make a dump of what is going on.