Another poor first byte time

[pmeenan]

Also, if nothing else jumps out as obvious, I'd recommend trying out the free trial of New Relic ( http://newrelic.com ). Don't want to sound like too much of a product pitch but within a few minutes of installing it you should see the hotspots really quickly (and the 14 day trial is more than long enough to fix a bunch of stuff).

I used it on WebPagetest when I was doing the scaling work (to support the testing needs for the launch of Google's Page Speed Service where traffic spiked from 40k page views/day to over 1M). There were a few seriously painful hotspots that I was aware of but didn't realize quite how painful they were until I actually instrumented it.