First, enable the devel module and take a look at what part of the process is slow. You should be able to see how much ram is being used, how long the page is taking to generate, and how long your sql queries are taking. The first thing to look into is what is your slow area.

Matt Farina
Geeks and God Co-Host
www.innovatingtomorrow.net
www.mattfarina.com

Thanks, sorry for the delayed response, but a vacation comes first.

I used the devel module, and got "Executed 1137 queries in 30751.94 milliseconds" on the front page. Yikes!

The output is lengthy so I uploaded it here: http://www.eternityplayers.org/2/uploads/YFCpage.html

I am not sure what this tells me, other than the fact that there is a lot of stuff on the page.

Thanks for your help.

That's far to many queries to generate a page. If I have 200 queries used to generate a page or if my queries take more than 400 milliseconds I see a problem. This is just crazy in both the number of queries and amount of time.

Matt Farina
Geeks and God Co-Host
www.innovatingtomorrow.net
www.mattfarina.com

I played around with YSlow and saw that the views slideshow was loading a lot of photos. For some reason I had set it up to show up to 100 photos, so it was trying to pull all 100 up on every page load. That was pretty stupid actually. So I reduced it to 10 photos in the slideshow and now it is much better. "Executed 327 queries in 744.15 milliseconds." Not snappy but tolerable.

YSlow is also making recommendations about server setup. The database queries are still pretty slow and are taking up to 30-40 ms each. I don't think I have any control over that since it is not my server.

I will look at it some more to see if anything else can be done. Thanks.

Is this hosted on a shared server? Speeds like that make me think so. Or, it's on a poorly configured or overloaded sql server.

Matt Farina
Geeks and God Co-Host
www.innovatingtomorrow.net
www.mattfarina.com

It is a shared server hosted by 1and1.com. Are there any tricks to make it work better?

I'm not up on tips to make shared hosting any faster. With a shared mysql server you can't make configuration changes that would bump up your performance. With a shared web server you can't install memcache or opcode caches which make things faster. With shared you're stuck with the configuration they give you which isn't optimal.

That's why we are fans of virtual servers and up. There is more control.

I'd just suggest making sure drupal is configured to use all built in performance enhancing options.

Matt Farina
Geeks and God Co-Host
www.innovatingtomorrow.net
www.mattfarina.com