Long "Waiting for http://www" Status Message

Why does my "Waiting For http://www." browser status message take long?

[theChronic]

Hello folks,
I am currently running a site that uses Joomla and a vBulletin forum. I am working on making my pages load faster and I have noticed that it is not the actual loading of the page that takes a long time but the "Waiting For [.."...]

It takes a few solid seconds and then when it finally seems to start loading it loads the page pretty quickly.

To test if its my internet I check some other sites (normally Google) and it quickly races to their site.

The forum homepage and the joomla homepage both have this "waiting problem".

I tried a couple real basic HTML pages on my site and they seem to load really quickly too.

Other sites' forum running the same system do not have the lag either.

I'm on a Shared Hosting plan with Verio.

Does anyone have any idea what is going on here?

thanks
John

[phranque]

it means the script is taking a long time before it serves content.
this could be caused by long load time to initialize the script and any included modules.
it could be a slow-to-connect db, inefficient query or content negotiation, etc...

[theChronic]

so how would you recommend fixing it?

change hosts? upgrade to a virtual private server instead of shared hosting? look through code?

is there any way to run an analysis on it?

thnx a lot

[rocknbil]

Let me give you a left field . . .

It could be your route to this website. I am on satellite here, most days it's fine but when all the kiddies get home between 3-7 PM it's a nightmare. Traffic bogs way down and I get a lot of waiting for www . . .

I know you've benchmarked against similar systems, but unless those systems are hosted on the exact same machine at your host, it could be your route to the server that's bogging down, while the routes to your benchmarks are shorter or have no problems. Use the tracert utility in DOS (Start-> type cmd, press enter, type tracert [domainname] press enter) to compare notes.

Inevitably it may very well be the host, but there are a lot of other factors involved. VPS or a dedicated server will obviously help you immensely.

[phranque]

It could be your route to this website.

except the OP mentions:

I tried a couple real basic HTML pages on my site and they seem to load really quickly too.