Why is my website so slow at certain times of the day?? HELPPPPPP!!
 

My website www.ithp.org goes lightning fast during parts of the day and other times it goes so slow it barely loads after an entire 5 minutes. This has no connection to the amount of traffic that is on the site.

By the way it is only the homepage that goes extremely slow. Every other page is very fast. The web dev. doesn't know how to fix it and either do I. If you want to get paid to fix the problem email me at admin@ithp.org

Basically we have a mysql database, godaddy linux hosting, and I believe it uses php. We should not be having these problems and I desperately need your help.

Well there isn't much we can say without knowing more about it such as the php code that runs in the main page that you're having problems with.

Also are you on a shared hosting package or do you hire a dedicated server / vps? - If you're on a shared machine it may not actually be your site at fault. It may well be that the mysql (database) server is being slowed down by another website that is accessing it (eg maybe someone has a badly coded website running multiple queries in a loop or it just gets a lot of visitors which also could weigh down the database server).

Either way, unless you can tell us more, there isn't much we can do to help!

There's also a bit of data on this first page. What kind of queries are you running? Are they truncated to length using PHP or are you using mysql to truncate that? If you pull every story article at full length, that's a lot of data to process. On the other hand, most of these links go external. So how do you get the data used here? Are you checking an online status before showing the articles? If so, you may have a remote site that's down.

I notice that on the homepage you have lots of articles linked from other websites.

My main question is are these scraped from their original pages? If the answer is yes then the next question is are they scraped live (as the page loads) or are they scraped in a background automated process or equivalent?

If it turns out that this is a live scrape then that's likely to be your bottleneck.