Joomla slow initial load, debug on

Question

So we use Joomla on our Intranet website, our network is all 1GB connections and 10GB at the servers so bandwidth is not an issue as to this loading problem. Some background, the setup is on a VM running ubuntu 14.04 has all the updates (updates for 14.04). We are currently running Joomla 3.2.1, i want to update to current but i need to fix the loading issue first because it has slow loading on 3.5.2 as well.

So this happened out of no where, the website is where most of the employees go to submit forms and such to supervisors and higher ups. Randomly a few days ago/a week ago the site initial load time went from .8s to upwards of 1Min or 2 Mins to load. I've tried turning cache on, compression on and no change. cache on 15, compression off and no change cache to 30, compression off and no change. Checked the PHP config for any over or under allocation of memory or processing, nothing. MySQL config for any over or under allocation, nothing. .htaccess for correct permissions and modrewrite config, nothing wrong.

I have nothing info wise in the logs for anything that shows something running into errors or issues or loop loading. I also migrated from a linux VM to an IIS7 VM and i still get inital load times that take forever. I am assuming it is some database issue but i don't know what.

I ran a repair on the database and everything came back ok. the VM has 8GB of RAM, 2 3.2GHz processor cores and does not use more then 20% processing on the cores and no more then 2GB of RAM our of 8GB. I am beating my head on my desk trying to find why it's going so slow so if someone can have some insight please post up some ideas for me to try. I have snapshots on the VM so anything i try i can revert back if needed.

Here are some debug snapshots as well, i know it is taking a while to load and query but to cause a page load time of 1-2mins?? http://postimg.org/gallery/1a4e0b27s/

Answer 1

20% is very high when it comes to load. We always try to maintain a load below 2. Anything above 2 means a slow website.

Let me give you a few tips:

• The RAM that you have is very small. You will need much more than that if you have many employees posting data. I would go with 64 GB. Your system is doing a lot of swapping and the fact that you probably don't have an SSD drive (I am assuming here, please correct me if I'm wrong) makes it worse.
• The MySQL slow query log should give you an idea what is going on. You can enable it in the my.cnf file.
• If you are using InnoDB, then it's almost a certainty that it is not properly configured in your my.cnf file (we are in the process of writing a post on how to configure it for Joomla websites, and once that post is finished I will share it here)

Answer 2

I found what was going on, the SP Weather module that someone used and hid on one of the pages was outdated and the API was broken.

Disabled the module to check, loaded up in milliseconds. Ended up finding the update and updating to fix the current weather module. Everything loads in a matter of a second or less, and the weather now works again.