Symphony.

I've used Joyent Shared SmartMachines for many years, starting with Textpattern (which is how I was introduced to Symphony CMS). Lately I've been experiencing very slow load times for what I believe are very simple pages.

General Details

Engine Initialisation   0.0000 s
Page creation process started   2.7913 s
XML Built   2.1136 s
XML Generation  0.0017 s
Page Built  2.3398 s
XSLT Transformation 0.5941 s
Page creation complete  5.7252 s

Datasource Execution

navigation  0.0789 s from 15 queries
posts_latest    2.1221 s from 27 queries
flickr_sets_by_system_id    0.2533 s from 22 queries

Full Page Render Statistics

Total Database Queries  75
Slow Queries (> 0.09s)  0
Total Time Spent on Queries 0.0174 s
Time Triggering All Events  0.0004 s
Time Running All Data Sources   0.3713 s
XML Generation Function 0.0015 s
XSLT Generation 0.0985 s
Output Creation Time    2.0799 s
Total Memory Usage  1.98 MB

As an experiment I copied my site to a Rackspace Cloud Server I have access to, and saw an order of magnitude improvement in performance, which leads me to believe the problem is with my host and not necessarily my site or Symphony.

Does my conclusion seem reasonable? Should I be looking for a new host?

Sadly, I've had a very similar experience on my lifetime shared account with Joyent. Very slow and unresponsive servers have forced me to stop utilizing the account for anything serious.

I'm quite confident it is NOT Symphony.

Thank you for your feedback Lewis, it is much appreciated.

Now off to research hosts…