How can I tell if a PHP install is corrupt? PHP pages display quickly, but continue to load for seconds

Question

I'm trying to convince a guy in IT that the PHP installation he gave me is corrupt (somehow). He did an upgrade to the latest PHP and since then, PHP pages have been slow. In a weird way.

If I visit a PHP page, the page displays instantly but the activity monitor in Safari shows activity for ~5 more seconds. When I use Safari's inspector, it looks like lots of things load, then there's a huge pause, then more things load. If I load a blank PHP page that doesn't reference CSS files or anything, it still sits for ~5 seconds.

Any ideas what could be causing this? It's hard for me to Google it because "PHP page loads slow" involves lots of different scenarios.

Is there a way I could somehow pinpoint why PHP loading is longer than it was before the upgrade?

Answer 1

If you set up a sample page with only the following in it, do you get the same behavior? This will show that php works . From a speed / content delivery point of view, you need to then determine what is causing the slowdown. phpinfo(); should load right away and display to the browser without much delay ...

<?php phpinfo(); ?>