A quick update on the Irreal loading problems. I ran a tcpdump on a typical page load of Irreal and discovered the following:
- The initial three-way handshake with the server completes almost immediately.
- Immediately afterwards the GET from the browser is received and the server ACKs the request.
- Nothing happens for about 22 seconds after which the Irreal home page starts to download. The download completes within 340 ms.
Phil wrote to say that he was seeing the same thing so I’m pretty confident that the problem is in generating the content for the home page. The same thing appears to happen anytime dynamic output is generated. I don’t understand why this suddenly started happening. Some people, such as Xah Lee, say that this has been happening for a while but it’s only recently that I’ve been seeing it. The only recent change is an automatic update to the WordPress software.
In any event, my next step was to install the W3 Total Cache plugin. I’m hoping this will make things better. If you are still seeing a 20 second or more delay on downloading the home page please let me know in the comments.