Intermittent Issue: pages take 30-40 seconds to load

I have been having an intermittent problem that only started after upgrading a site to EE 7 (7.3.14). Never seen this happen on a site before.

https://www.trekalaska.com

The site becomes EXTREMELY unresponsive. I am not talking about a few seconds to load a page, I mean like 30-40 seconds to load.

So this is not a question of better optimization or something. A 3-4 sec. page load is an optimization issue - this is something else.

It’s not my internet connection. Other sites load fine.

It’s really more of a server response time than page load

Here is a message I got on pagespeed.web

Unable to resolve https://www.trekalaska.com/. Try checking the URL for validity.

I got a support guy on Hostgator to look at it when it was doing this and he said…

“The problem i saw is that it creates lots of processes and does not close them. The processes were created by index.php file.

Processes that are not closing immediately are fixed by optimizing scripts, but I’ll try to add some cache headers on this so it will use the cache instead of creating a new process.”

Does this make sense to someone?

Like I said, this is not a constant occurance but it could last for 20 minutes or so meaning the site is effectivly off-line