HELP! Server is slowed down, but ONLY on Zen-Cart

I have a dedicate server running a few IPs. One of the IPs is for a client. I built them an HTML face that leads into /store/ for their product catalog. Everything has been fine till a few days ago. now the HTML pages run fine, but when you go to enter the ZenCart pages, it takes 30seconds - 3 minutes to load the index page. once the index page loads, it runs fine. Now to mix it up a bit - Another IP I have on my server is running OS Commerce, which is PHP, and that runs GREAT, but i'm switching that site over to ZenCart, so I've added ZenCart in /store/ on that IP also. That IP's ZenCart is doing the SAME THING! As I said, it was always fine, now all the sudden that pages take FOREVER! Any ideas?

The URL of one of the slow sites?

scandinavian-furniture.net/store/
or
restonclouds.com/store/

Thanks!

GULP!!! the page size could have a bit to do with it...

http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/wso.php?url=http://scandinavian-furniture.net/store/

http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/wso.php?url=http://restonclouds.com/store/

Did you just restart your server? Neither URL appears to be slow at the moment ...

Note: scandinavian-furniture.net/store needs to be upgrade to v1.3.0.2 you appear to be running v1.3 and there have been 2 upgrades since then ...

Be sure to backup both the site and your database and use the Full Zen Cart v1.3.0.2 for the upgrade ...

Seems slow to me. I only looked at scandinavian-furniture.net/store/ but there the image sizes seems at least 10 times and sometime more the size that I would expect for front page thumbnails.

This thread gives a helpful introduction to managing images for Zen Cart and the Image Handler add-in does a great job of taking the pain out of it.

Thanks for pointing out about the thumbnail size on the website. i'm going to beat them! i spent 2 hours with them showing them how to optomize the 3 size photos!

Well, I finally found the REAL problem. We didn't have a firewall on the server, and it was getting BOMBARDED by haccker pings and stuff. We installed the firewall. Also we optimized the hipache settings, and a couple other server settings. Things seem to be working now. thanks everyone!

Ahh. Clients. Life would be much more straightforward without them? (But rather less interesting!)

Thanks very much for the update ... it is always a great help to know when odd server issues occure that cause issues on the site ...

Hey Kim,
Thanks for that optimization tool! very cool! Have you ever used these guys to optomize any of your sites? Did you see a significant increase in traffic?