Why are some requests on page load taking so long?

Question

I'm using Firefox with the Firebug add-on. As the picture below shows, there are some requests that are waiting for more than one second while the rest are completed within milliseconds as the page begins to load. The total page load time is much higher than I expected it to be.

1. Why are some of the requests taking more than one second?
2. How can I fix this?

The first request is the page itself, which is what I expected the load time to be.

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EDIT:

I should probably have mentioned, this is a local site with a thin Apache client installed on a computer. When I load the same page on the live (yet local, IIS) site, I get these readings, and they are completely normal.

Hmm, the total size is much lower than from the other one. Maybe there's no caching on the other one? Maybe it has something to do with that? :P

Anyone care to explain?

Answer 1

If the code is unchanged between the two installations, I'd start looking at your webserver configs and the differences between the Apache and IIS installations.

As an aside you also want to look at reducing the number of CSS and JS files to avoid round trips to the server

Answer 2

You main page is just slowly generated. If it is a dynamic page you could have a look at the operations the page does and speed them up.