cmendla - 12:44 pm on Jan 7, 2013 (gmt 0)

Thanks for the replies and ideas. I put an extension on that shows the page load times. They were around 30 seconds.

I installed another copy of joomla with the same template in a different folder. That was loading under 10 seconds. I then did a systematic check of all the extensions and found that an seo extension was interacting with the new version of php and one of the other extensions. That particular extension does not auto update.

The newest version of the seo extension solved the problems.

IOW, I found it by disabling all of the non core extensions and then adding them back one at a time.