Wordpress Website too much wait Time with Pingdom Tool

Question

I'm working on a wordpress website:

- it's hosted on a VMWARE Linux Virtual Server with 2 core and 4GB RAM.
- it's the only website (development server) so no others website access.
- has Apache Module mod_deflate on text, html, javascript, css, xml
- it runs a lot of javascript stuff and the total size of the page is about 1,6 MB
- average cpu load is very low (0% to 5%)
- the server has 1GB RAM Free
- my ISP verified SAN access statistics and latency times are very low (some ms)

This is a load time test on Pingdom Website Speed Test: http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/dMWeVi/http://www.watcheswholesale.eu/

it shows 3,9 seconds of wait time.

Is there a "check list" to understand why the server lose these seconds before sending content to the browser?
Thanks

Answer 1

I did a profiling an a wordpress installation once, being embarrassed by such a loading time.

It turned out that the time can be reduced by half with some opcode cache like APC, and another half been taken by parsing an enormous .po localization file. Did a quick patch to cache it in a php array and finally got loading time within a second (which is still too much but barely bearable).

Now I am thinking that removing useless languages from that gettext file would also help.

The profiling itself was as silly as adding microtime(1)-based labels all ove the code

Answer 2

Your fundamental problem is the site is taking too long to generate the page - I'd start by looking at how many DB calls are being made and how long they are taking - the query logs can help you with this.

You also need to turn on keep-alive so that you are reusing TCP connections but that'll only make a little bit of difference.