I may have some news to report on this situation. Follow-up thread to be posted shortly.

I'm using Comcast from San Francisco (ARIN block 71.204.128.0/18). Ping doesn't show any packet loss, average round-trip-time is 32.571ms (pretty normal), traceroute isn't being terribly informative but nothing abnormal. It doesn't look like a network problem at all.

Using a packet sniffer to time things, the traffic appears very bursty. The TCP handshake is almost instant, and data packets are immediately ACKed, which is good. This means the network is in good shape, and the OS kernel is responding in a timely manner. However, the lag between the request packet and the "200 OK" is over 4 seconds, and the data stalled for 32 seconds shortly after that. In total, the page took 68 seconds to load from SYN to FIN, which is outrageous. Only about 1 second of that was actual transmission across the network; the other 67 seconds of delay was the browser waiting for the webserver to continue.

Looking more closely at the transmission, there were a ridiculous number of tiny packets. Saving a copy of your index page to a remote webserver of mine and fetching it from there, I required 245 total packets (590 byte packets, 524 byte payloads). Requesting it directly from your server, I required 316 packets. A majority were of normal size (again, 590 byte packets, 524 byte payloads), but 23 were under 200 bytes (134 byte payloads) and 8 were under 100 bytes (34 byte payloads). One was actually 68 bytes (2 byte payload) and another was 67 bytes (1 byte payload)!

These are unbelievably tiny packets. This tells me that output buffering is turned off on your host's copy of PHP; the first thing I would do is ask your hosting company to make sure that "output_buffering = 4096" is set in php.ini, because those tiny packets are hurting both your website and their network infrastructure. There's probably more than that going on as well; I wouldn't be surprised if there's a runaway process on the webserver machine. The burstiness and inconsistency suggest that things are swapping to disk, which no production webserver should ever do.

I've saved the packet capture and made it available on my personal webserver if you need evidence to convince them. It's in libpcap format, so any reasonable packet sniffing program (Wireshark, tcpdump, etc.) should be able to read it. For comparison, I also saved an example of what the packet capture should look like.

I contacted my host, who claimed they ran some tests and didn't detect any database connectivity problems. They had me run a traceroute to my site, and when I showed them the results, they said the problem was that my internet connection had high latency, and that I should contact my ISP.

This explanation was obviously not the correct one. First of all, there are the many people in this thread who've also noticed the same problem. Second, I've also noticed this problem logging in to my site from a different location and a different ISP. Third, what the traceroute actually showed was that no packets were dropped until the probes reached my host's network. The server running my site, in fact, has shown better than 50% packet loss in responding to pings, which would certainly explain the slowness that so many of you have experienced.

As you can imagine, I'm not thrilled at being given the run-around. Personally, I'm inclined to suspect that the shared server on which my site runs has been set up to host more sites than it can reasonably support, and either its outgoing bandwidth or its CPU is saturated. I wrote back to my host with these points, and at last notice, they said my message had been relayed to their "advanced technical support team". I'm hopeful that that means it's being investigated by someone who actually has the power to fix this problem. I'll give them a few days, and if I get no satisfaction, then I'm going to explore alternate hosting options for Daylight Atheism.

Today was very slow compared to past experience.

Maybe if we all prayed about this?

Let's hope it's that and not a sign from gawd.

Just to add one to the statistics, Yes, I've noticed a slowdown.