py9jmas - 11:51 pm on Dec 30, 2005 (gmt 0)

It sounds like you've got PHP scripts running on the UK server querying a database on a US server. Round trip time between the UK and US is about 70msecs. For each database query, PHP has to wait at least 70msec for the reply. If you have 20 queries, that'll add at least 1.4 seconds to the time it takes PHP to build the HTML.

From a responsiveness angle, the first thing I'd do is get PHP and the database nearer to each other, or at least on the same continent.