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I had this problem for awhile too, your situation is likely different but for me it turned out to be (I believe) that I was running an older version of the tiny content module with no content in it and it was spawning neverending processes everytime it was accessed, eventually winding up the processor to almost 100% and the server grinded down to a near halt. I have a dedicated server so it took longer to overwhelm, but eventually even that didn't matter.
Check your CPU usage when you see long load times like that, if it is running near 100% you likely have a similar problem. I terminaled in and killed all my http processes and restarted them, thereby killing all the rogue processes in the background and my site instantly went from a 15 second load time to a consistent 2 second load time.
Set up a static 50kb or so webpage somewhere on the server with a url you can call directly so you can gauge how fast that page loads vs. php pages that have to access the database. That can maybe tell you if something related to your DB is the problem, or just the host in general.
Check your CPU usage when you see long load times like that, if it is running near 100% you likely have a similar problem. I terminaled in and killed all my http processes and restarted them, thereby killing all the rogue processes in the background and my site instantly went from a 15 second load time to a consistent 2 second load time.
Set up a static 50kb or so webpage somewhere on the server with a url you can call directly so you can gauge how fast that page loads vs. php pages that have to access the database. That can maybe tell you if something related to your DB is the problem, or just the host in general.
