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I'm trying to convince a guy in IT that the PHP installation he gave me is corrupt (somehow). He did an upgrade to the latest PHP and since then, PHP pages have been slow. In a weird way.

If I visit a PHP page, the page displays instantly but the activity monitor in Safari shows activity for ~5 more seconds. When I use Safari's inspector, it looks like lots of things load, then there's a huge pause, then more things load. If I load a blank PHP page that doesn't reference CSS files or anything, it still sits for ~5 seconds.

Safari's web inspector

Any ideas what could be causing this? It's hard for me to Google it because "PHP page loads slow" involves lots of different scenarios.

Is there a way I could somehow pinpoint why PHP loading is longer than it was before the upgrade?

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I'm now reading that turning on output_buffering, especially for an IIS6 install, can solve a problem like this. I will give it a shot and report back. –  dallen Apr 14 '11 at 22:01
Something like that would be a configuration problem of some sort. A "corrupt" PHP install would be far more likely to completely bomb out totall than do everything right except for exiting at the end. Have you tried running one of the scripts from the command line? That'd be using the same PHP install with slightly different config. –  Marc B Apr 14 '11 at 22:07

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If you set up a sample page with only the following in it, do you get the same behavior? This will show that php works. From a speed / content delivery point of view, you need to then determine what is causing the slowdown. phpinfo(); should load right away and display to the browser without much delay ...

<?php phpinfo(); ?>  
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