Hi,
Are your other sites also running version 5.5.2.1 as well? If so, that is about 6 versions old. I've noticed with keeping my sites upgraded to the newest (5.6.1.2) the site speed has trended significantly faster.
Also, as should be done with any CMS, I updated my .htaccess to take advantage of file compression and implement better practices in leveraging browser caching of static content. ( webpagetest.org is really helpful for this )

I confirm, upgrading to 5.6.1.2 has made a huge difference, the improvement in speed is incredible, especially on a shared host.

Deladroid, have you tried putting your google analytics in footer instead of loading in header?

I looked at ur site in Safari (windows), Chrome latest version (windows), and Firefox latest version (windows).. and it did in fact take a bit to load, not unbearable though. But after a view source, first thing I noticed none of your js is loaded at the end of pageload, namely GA.
Although a pagespeed test of that home page did not show GA as the culprit, these did:
view.css?v=5285c29a4cd6330d02f11a0f082546e7
22.81 s

view.css?v=5285c29a4cd6330d02f11a0f082546e7
21.32 s

fullcalendar.css?v=5285c29a4cd6330d02f11a0f082546e7
22.23 s

Everything else on that home page loaded in milliseconds, even other css files.
Lastly, ALL of your other CSS files were cached EXCEPT those top 3 above. IMO, I would start there, maybe figure out how to cache those also?
Maybe someone more seasoned with C5 could point you in a better direction..

You need to enable browser caching and gzip

This gif is huge (relatively) and could be much smaller:
http://www.pndc.us/themes/pndc/images/main/slider-main-loading.gif...

http://www.concrete5.org/community/forums/customizing_c5/performanc...

Thanks for all your replies. I'll look at each one of them and make some changes.

I did try to update C5 via the notification, but it kept erroring out after a bit when clicking the "Download" button. Maybe I'll try side loading the update.

Yeah, something is definitely up. I would highly recommend testing with 5.6.1.2. It's possible that your host doesn't like the file based caching that we used to do frequently, and in 5.6.1 we stripped all that out and took some different approaches to optimization.

I don't think this necessarily is just MySQL load either. In my test I tried to go to tools/required/upgrade to see your current version and it took 10-15 seconds to load that page, which hardly does any queries.

Thanks Andrew. I'm about to do the update now. I'll also optimize things based on the suggestions too.

Please post how it goes Deladroid or if you have any helpful hints - as I'm about to update from 5.6.0.1 to the latest as well later tonight.

Most definitely. Stay tuned.

AS dmsims mentioned you need to look gzip and caching, see attached.

Also looking at your source code there are several errors that are not helping either.

I just upgraded to 5.6.1.2 (from 5.6.0.1) - and the performance improvement at this time is like night and day. I was concerned but things appear to be all right with the world once again. I'm still monitoring.

I backed myself in a corner with a side-load of the upgrade and finally got the site back to 90%. There still a hanging issue with "where did page defaults go?" and an "invalid" error when trying to view a stack that is no longer showing/working.

Otherwise, the speed has been noticeable, and I'm still going to enable compression too. Thanks for the replies!

Deladroid (and others):

If you're still having problems with speed, and are reasonably comfortable with PHP, then PM me. I've been tinkering with a C5 profiler script that I'd like to test out in a real-world environment...

After upgrading to the latest 5.6, it's way faster. I'm still working to enable compression, but without it, it's still great.

I'm just having issues with the web.config file initiating compression, as it's not actually enabling it even though it's in the config.

Thanks!

You can configure compression through your web.config file as follows:

<system.webServer>
<urlCompression doStaticCompression="true" doDynamicCompression="true" />
</system.webServer>

You need to ensure that Http Dynamic Compression is installed otherwise setting doDynamicCompression="true" will not have any effect. The quickest way to do this is:

Start > Type optionalfeatures (this is the quickest way to get to the "Turn Windows Features on or off" window)

Navigate to Internet Information Services > World Wide Web Services > Performance Features in the "Windows Features" treeview
Ensure "Dynamic Content Compression" is ticked
Click "Ok" and wait whilst Windows installs the component

Thanks! Found it, installed and enabled it! I'm good to go now.