Loading the the home page the first time is slow

[Thomas Bjelkeman-Pettersson]

Loading of the home page < (http://www.akvo.org/ > is very slow, specifically before the first content is delivered it takes quite a long time (3-4 seconds). Gabriel and I have speculated that this is because of the way the Apache configuration is currently done.

[Gabriel von Heijne (gabriel-akvo)]

Blueprint https://blueprints.launchpad.net/akvo.rsr/+spec/home-page-manager is the long term fix for this.
Short term we need to change the way the home page chooses between the "low" and "hi" bandwidth versions of the page.

[Gabriel von Heijne (gabriel-akvo)]

The flash version of the home page has been removed. This in itself is not a great speed-up but I think the redirection going on to check for flash capability may be part of the slowness and it confuses google.
What causes the greatest slowdown on newdev is the loading of the blog posts. They are pulled via rss from www.akvo.org and it takes around 10 seconds to get them. This is not quite as big an issue on akvo1 where communication with wordpress to get the blogs in intra-machine. However we really need a caching scheme for this on the production server too.