My PHP site takes 10 secs to load the first page

marcomon

Hi.

Working with PHP5, I'm suffering an odd issue with the load of my website, which is an application allowing users to register and to post question in a kind of forum/bboard.

It's made with some PHP classes I created (they write/read to/from mySQL tables), and uses Smarty.

But the first time one user access any webpage, it takes 5-10 seconds to load. Then the rest of pages visited by the same user go really fast, so I'm wondering what's wrong with my PHP app.

Do you have similar experiences? I'm considering:

Smarty takes some seconds to compile
App takes some second to handle session variables (I use a lot of them)

Any suggestion is welcome. Thank you very much,
--mark

stolzyboy

Try putting in a simple timer within PHP script to count the time from start to finish of script.

This will help you see if it's PHP taking a long time to run or if it's the server taking time to serve up the page.

There are a ton of variables that could cause slowdowns, from the script to the database to the server to you_name_it.

NogDog

The fact that it is only the initial access that takes longer would seem to point to an issue with the output, specifically images and other things that can be cached by the browser such as JavaScript files and stylesheets. You might want to try http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/ to see what issues it reports (if any) concerning the loading of your page elements.