--snip--
I'm working with some folks to develop a web site with a very similar configuration (Apache, Drupal, MySQL, not sure which Linux distro is underneath it all though) that's hosted by IX web hosting. We are seeing very similar behavior. It has gotten better since we complained to IX but we still see a significant lag the first time the site loads. The fast load on subsequent visits could be explained by Drupal doing some caching of needed items so it doesn't have to go to the database.
The initial site load time became much more noticeable after IX took some kind of hit on their DB server. All we know is the site suddenly couldn't connect to the database, they fixed something on their end and the database came back but we've had the long lag for first load ever since.
BTW, pleased to make your acquaintance, Dave.
Cheers, Dave Miller
-- Politics, n. Strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. -- Ambrose Bierce
CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
We were thinking along similar lines and turned off caching. We also added the drupal 'devel' module. It can be set up to show all the DB calls a page is making. So far some slow queries, but nowhere near explaining the whole 10-12s.
So far I've been able to rule out apache, php rendering, and DNS. It's almost definitely a MySQL connection issue, and I'm reasonably certain it's a php-mysql issue. Interestingly we've copied over the drupal install to Fedora 8 and Fedora 9 boxes and it runs like a champ. I've got a basic Drupal 6.5 install on my desktop (CentOS 5.2 x86_64) and it runs well. I'm in the process of installing CentOS 5.2 on another ESX VM to see if "something" was installed wrong, etc. Not ruling out operator error here.
Nice to meet you as well, Dave. There certainly are a few of us floating around.
Thanks. David M Miller