Slow on First Load

[proprod]

Hi all.

I recently purchased a VPS and am very happy. Been with Hostgator for several years now.

I'm only having one issue thus far on the VPS. I only have one account set up and am currently designing the site. When I first visit the site in the browser, it loads very slowly. Subsequent visits after that are great. If I wait an hour or so and go back to the site, it's slow on the initial visit again. It's almost as if it's sleeping and once I've awakened it, it's fine.

Please let me know if you have any suggestions.

Thanks.

[GvilleRick]

If you can provide the domain for the site we can test and see how it loads for us.

[GatorDaveC]

Is your site SQL driven? If so, I'm betting you have a query that isn't being indexed very well, so the 2nd time it loads it probably gets cached.

[proprod]

Originally Posted by GatorDaveC

Is your site SQL driven? If so, I'm betting you have a query that isn't being indexed very well, so the 2nd time it loads it probably gets cached.

Ahh. Good call. It is SQL driven and gets cached. So that would make sense. I will enable monitoring and check to see which query.

Thanks. Will report back.

[proprod]

Originally Posted by GvilleRick

If you can provide the domain for the site we can test and see how it loads for us.

If the above does not enlighten me, I will report back. Thanks.

[c3mtech]

Also make sure you add expires headers and public cache control to your includes files. You can also experiment with mod_deflate

[proprod]

Turns out there was a pretty large sql query that wasn't being cached at all and also one that did nothing that was invalid.

I believe the first query converted the data to session variables. And boom, when my session expired...

I'm going to check the page in about an hour and see what type of load time I get.

PS: I've got the expires headers and what not all set. Gzip also. I score a 97% on PageSpeed which is why I was curious what was the hold up