abkaiser - 4:58 am on Jan 28, 2008 (gmt 0)

In my troubleshooting this problem, I found these utilities:

Web Page Analyzer:
[websiteoptimization.com...]

I used some of the techniques mentioned here to find my dynamic page size. They didn't work as accurately as I like, or give me very much information. This tool does. Even recommends where your pages need fine tuning, and what kind of tuning they need. (I found out, for example, I'm probably loading too much javascript).

Firebug:
[getfirebug.com...]

It's a plugin for FireFox. Allows you to watch pages load in real-time, and allows you to view code in real time as well. Gives readouts for KB loaded, and the time it takes to load every aspect of the page. Perfect for what I needed.

And for those interested, I did eventually find the problem: It was partially the graphics on my pages - I had a bunch of JPGs that weren't compressed very well. I redid the compression on all my graphics and cut my page load times almost half.

The other part of the problem was that my site was on an underpowered server - as my site grew in popularity (2000+ uniques per day or so), it would also get spidered, often my multiple spiders at once. During those times, the dynamic page generation would kill the memory on the server and cause a slowdown. My host moved me to a heftier server.

Problems are solved.

Thanks for the help, everyone!