Windows fresh Wordpress install, more than 1 sec page generation time. Is there something wrong?

Question

I rent Windows 2008 64 R2 on a shared hosting environment with the following specs:

• Intel XEON E5520 @ 2.27GHZ
• 2 GB RAM
• IIS 7.5
• PHP v5.4
• MySQL 5.5.27
• FastCGI

Normally, I develop for .NET, and my websites are working great with fast rendering times.

However, I have a couple of Wordpress sites as well, and they are rather slow compared to the .NET websites. Today, I decided to investigate this. I just installed a fresh WordPress 3.8 copy using WPI (Web Platform Installer).

The website takes about 1.1 seconds to render (so it takes 1.1 seconds before any response is returned from my web server), which is, in my opinion, really slow.

I didn't install PHP/MySQL on the server myself, but I think that the best well known practices are in place, at least FastCGI is installed.

But still, I believe that Wordpress should be performing much better, even on a WIMP environment.

So, my questions are:

• Should I expect more performance with this setup on the given environment (no additional optimizations such as caching), or is 1.1 seconds of rendering time normal?
• And if so, any ideas on what's going on?

Btw, I know that I can speedup Wordpress somewhat by using plugins like W3TC.

Answer 1

Today, I finally was able to fix my slow loading problem; until now, my Wordpress sites where still loading slowly.

By chance, I stumbled upon this article:

http://www.customfitonline.com/news/2013/6/20/solve-wordpress-on-windows-server-problems/

I was like, let's try that "Slow Page Loading" tip, change localhost to 127.0.0.1 in wp_config.php:

define('DB_HOST', 'localhost');

To

define('DB_HOST', '127.0.0.1');

Sure enough, this setting makes a HUGE difference in page loading!