I’m familiar with best practices in optimizing pages to load up quickly, but I know very little about all the other factors that can cause pages to load slowly.
In trying to better understand how to troubleshoot slow page load on EE sites, I’ve read Greg Aker’s helpful article Troubleshooting Site Performance Issues, and I’ve turned on the Output Profiler and Template Debugging.
I’m baffled, though, about intermittent slow loads. For example, there’s a page on one of my sites that typically loads in 3-5 seconds, but every once in a while, it will take more than 25 seconds to load. Because the page regularly loads in just a few seconds, I’m inclined to think that the cause of the now-and-again whopping page load time is not in the template—does that logic hold, or am I missing something?
In instances where the page takes a very long time to load, I’m also observing that the Total Execution Time benchmark in the Output Profiler is several times longer. The database query times, however, don’t seem to be correlated in this way.
I’m wondering if these datapoints are indicative of the PHP server being taxed?
Once again, I’m new to this stuff and greatly appreciate any guidance and advice. Thanks!