Why does the same html page take 25 sec to load on one server and 2 sec to load on another?

Question

I have the exact same html sitting on two different servers. Both pages call things like stylesheets and images from the same servers (not each from their local server). In other words, these pages are identical except they exist on two different servers. It's all static html. The only DNS lookups are for images.

On one server it takes 25 seconds to load, and it appears most of that is waiting on the html page itself

http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/CmGSycTZd/http://205.158.110.184/contents/mylayout/2

On another server it takes under 2 seconds to load

http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/rqg73fi7V/http://socialmediaphyte.com/TEST/image-dns-testing-ImageON.html

The only difference I can ID from Pingdom is "Connection." The slow server responds with "close" and the fast server responds with "Keep-Alive". Is THAT the most likely issue? Or is it possibly something else? (And if you know the remedy for your suspected cause, that would be wonderful.)

Thanks!

Answer 1

Not using keep-alive will slow the overall load time a bit because you incur the additional overhead of having to establish a new connection for each resource, rather than re-using one or more connections. This shouldn't equate to 23 seconds difference though.

Using the FireBug Net Panel for Firefox can be of great assistance in seeing what is taking so long. It shows you how long each requested resource from the page took to load, and how long each phase of requesting the resource took.

Other factors could include one server is using gzip compression on pages and the other is not, or it could just be overloaded.