Slow site speed in certain country

[terrybarnes]

I have a site that is hosted on Dedicated UK server and the speed of the site is fantastically quick when I view it in the UK. The problem is when I view the site in South Africa it takes an absolute age to load certain sections of the site... I don't mean 20 seconds or so, I'm talking more like 10-15 minutes.

It uses a fair amount of PHP to talk to the Database but I'm still perplexed as to what can be happening.

We've spoken to both the developers and hosts and neither can shed any light on the situation.

Any ideas of what could be wrong or what diagnostic checks I can do to figure out the problem?

[tangor]

Your South Africa slow speed is from every ISP from there or just one tester? If one tester then have them try your site on a different system/isp (not theirs) to see if there's a difference. Otherwise that is a very interesting question!

[terrybarnes]

Unfortunately it's from a whole load of South African testers.

[tangor]

Create and serve a non-published STATIC HTML page. Send that URI to your SA testers. See if that loads quick (about 20-30k text). Rule that out before looking to see if php generated pages is the cause.

[LifeinAsia]

Is it every page, or just certain pages that are slow?

Also, is it just your site or other sites in the UK that are slow for them?

[terrybarnes]

I shall ask my colleague in SA on Friday and report back... I do remember when I visited a few months back that all other UK sites were fine. There was one day where Telcom (the only telephone provider in SA) had issues with the Internet and only SA hosted websites could be viewed - all other worldwide sites couldn't... for around 4 hours!