Thanks for your help so far, Sue & John.
Our host is YourHosting.nl in the Netherlands. We haven’t used them before for any other dynamic sites. It wasn’t always like this, though. The slow saving of templates/posts started about 6 months ago, but we aren’t sure what caused it.
The speed of the front end is okay. It could be faster, but it’s nowhere near as slow as when you save a post or template for the first time. That takes about a minute. Then when you save it again or go on to do something else things are okay again.
Are there a lot of extra things that EE needs to do the first time you do something in CP? Is it common that it is slower at the beginning of your session?
We’re using the Multiple Sites Manager (with two sites), Discussion Forum Module (only installed, not in use yet) and these other modules are installed: Akismet, Blacklist/Whitelist, Blogger API, Comment, Email, Emoticon, Freeform, Photo Gallery, IP to Nation, Keyword, LG Polls, Mailing List, Member, Metaweblog API, Moblog, Pages, Query, Referrer, RSS, Search, Simple Commerce, Statistics, Tag, Trackback, Updated Sites, User, Weblog, Wiki