High Parse Times - Query times OK

[BodyJewels]

This is the latest version of Zen. Everything seems to run just fine. I have searched here and googled on several occasions. So far I have not found anything that seems to fit this particular issue.

What seems to be happening is an initial parse time of 20 seconds, Query times are always well under 1 second. typical around .08 - .12 seconds. The parse time only jumps up and it is always exactly 20.xxx seconds.

It is most noticeable if I have not been to the site in a while. Say an hour or so. Every subsequent page load parse times are normal. >1 second. I am at a loss here and cannot explain it to the customer.

Does anyone have any idea at all what this could be? I know we are losing some people while they are waiting for the page to load.

FWIW you will have to view source to see the Parse times, they are not "on page" but they are embedded in source near the end of page.

It seems it may be a cache issue, where the cache must be rebuilt if it is aged? IDK I am drawing straws. hopefully someone here can point what I am missing.

site is at http://www.bodyjewels.com

[kobra]

It seems it may be a cache issue, where the cache must be rebuilt if it is aged?

Exactly, but 20 seconds is still a long time??
Is this a 'nix server or a win server?
Is it a shared hosting account?

[BodyJewels]

Sorry about that. It is a Unix CentOS 5 flavor, running on Media temple's DV VPS server. Yes it is shared, however I actually have several sites running on Media Temple and everyone of them runs very well. Wordpress, a custom PHP app using smarty templates we have developed, as well as another zen cart in development all run really well.

This site is the only one hosted on this VPS.

[kobra]

Media temple's DV VPS server

This site is the only one hosted on this VPS.

Your experience with them differs from any that I have...
What resources does this VPS have
% CPU
% CPU burst
RAM

[BodyJewels]

That I cannot answer, I only know that we have a dedicated 256M Ram, and 20G of storage. I do not know the CPU questions nor can I find anything like that. I can tell from experience with another site on the same platform, that serves over 10,000 pages per day of php/smarty cache, and the CPU usage sits at around .20 percent during peak. .10 average. Parse times around .10 or so.

What I noticed and when this became very apparent. Was when we switch from a full dedicated box, to the VPS. Her traffic does not warrant a full ded.

What used to be 4 or 5 seconds delay, has now ballooned to a full 20 seconds. Everything seems to point to a cache issue IMHO.

[DrByte]

If the query time is low but the parse time is high, that generally indicates that the processing of the PHP instructions is what's taking up the most time. This usually suggests that the server's CPU load is too high, because the delays are in PHP processing, and not in the database queries.