Slow initial website load, faster subsequent loads

Question

My site www.slople.com is a mix of self-programmed things (the whole slope-finder etc and the mobile-site) and Wordpress/Buddypress-things (Slople Unity, Blog).

I notice that the page takes longer to load on the first request, no matter where it goes (startpage, particular slope, blog) than subsequent pageloads.

The site is running on my "own" VPS with CentOS and Plesk 11. I use APC, nginx, Apache, MySql and PHP 5.1

I suppose some of you could have an idea where I'd have to look into or what could be the cause. I always think it could depend on my DNS (I run my own DNS-service with plesk).

The machine is powerful enough, never uses more than 1/3 of it's RAM. Thanks for any inputs!

Answer 1

Try "Page Speed" tab of FireBug.

As I see your server has no gzip compression for static content. Compression can be switched on in nginx config .

Also, website has a lot of separate PNG, CSS and JS files. I know some CMS templates allows to gather all JS and CSS in single files. PNG files also can be gathered in single file.