I’ve been getting a lot of complains lately that my blog is very slow. I experienced it myself too, but I couldn’t recall which changes caused it. I checked all logs and configurations and everything looked just fine.
I asked Vladimir Ivaschenko to help me track down the problem. He is known as The Master of strace, so I was pretty sure that he would be help me. And I was right.
Within minutes, we found out that problems were caused by del.icio.us Smart Tagging plugin that I have installed not so long ago. With plugin activated, wget would take anywhere from 15 to 90 seconds to load the front page of the site. Deactivating the plugin, makes wget finish in less than 3 seconds. I consider the difference to be big enough for the functionality that this plugin brings in, so I disabled it. Maybe I will use it later again, when things get faster.
Thanks a lot Vladimir!