We are working on a site whose pages are taking 17 seconds to load when it is not cached. What you see here is CCK content types like Book, Video, etc. in Block Views, which are then used in Mini Panels. These Mini Panels are joined together to create widgets. We are showing three nodes at a time for each content type - Still loading 12 different content types requires a large number of SQL queries.
At first we were thinking that the thumbnails for videos and books that are being pulled from YouTube and Google Books are causing the delay, but this does not appear to be the case. The puzzling thing is that even when a page has no content, it still takes 17 seconds to load for the first time.
Any suggestions for changing the architecture of the page to improve the page load times would be much appreciated. If you have worked on a similar issue before and can help us for a fee please contact me directly.
Comments
devel
what does devel say is taking all the time; DB or PHP?
Maybe use fields instead of nodes in the mini panels
If you ar using nodes in the mini panels that might be the problem, try using fields for only the fields you need in a view that uses the node you are displaying as an argument. I've found that is almost always faster than doing a full node load for each if there are multiple nodes needed on a page.