Very high page load times?

Question

I have a Drupal site built on a shared host and I'm finding that the site is very slow to respond. I susepect it's the host and not my Drupal/database configurations but I don't know how to decipher the results from Pingdom.

I have also read Explanation of Pingdom Results but am unsure of how to resolve my problems.

• Pingdom results show a Load Time of 60 seconds.
• Performance Grade tab shows results of all items at or near 100.
• According to the Page Analysis tab, most of the time is spent on the Wait state.

Does the above indicate a problem with my hosting or perhaps domain name provider or is there something that I can do to improve performance of my website?

I should also mention that I've used other tools like Google's Page Speed Chrome plugin and Firefox's Yslow plugin and both give an above average rating to my webpages which leads me to believe it's an issue with my host.

Answer 1

Drupal has this issues of abusing database queries especially if you use a lot of modules on one page and do not cache anything. That may slow down your site considerably. I use Pressflow Drupal`s profile to reduce some load times I also ad Varnish to server (you can look at Memcache too) I also add Boost module to the site itself. But the most important thing is to get query per page load number right. If have written some custom code optimize it. Look for ways to get same data without sending queries to the server maybe some data was already loaded to the page and you do not need tome queries.

In your particular case I think that some lose loop which does not end but has safety trigger which kills it after certain amount of time. I can bet that the reason is somewhere in your custom code or some underdeveloped module. Try to enable display of all the error.

P.S. Example of such page would be the best way determine what is wrong.