The fact that's its created on the fly certainly wont help matters but given the low level of usage that shouldn't be too painful. certainly not the 30-40 seconds you are seeing.

The code quality is really really bad but you cant control that, thats an ancient copy of joomla for you..

Yslow / firebug is free.

I'd download a free tool such as http://www.aptana.org/ or http://www.microsoft.com/web/webmatrix/ use a template from a site like
http://www.freewebtemplates.com/
http://www.oswd.org/

there are loads to choose from and do your own thing........

or even stick sharepoint on a box

I think it was created via Joomla 1.6. Given that it's up to 2.5 now, my plan was to create an updated site via Joomla.

Do you think if I created a newer, leaner site based on Joomla, it would help speed things up? Or should I look at alternatives to Joomla? It would need to be free, relatively easy to use and maintain, and stored on a local computer which could then be accessed by other computers on the LAN with minimum of fuss.

I suppose the question is how easy would it be to set up a new copy of joomla and to a couple of test pages to see if its fast or not. ( I don't know joomla at all so i can't comment )

My feeling is that unless you have loads of content that changes regularly or need a functionally rich site static pages would be as good a way forward as any other.

What does the CPU utilisation of them go to when you load a slow page? And the total CPU utilisation? Also, how many CPUs are there in the performance tab?

It's not uncommon for the AV to be set to "paranoid mode" and scan every file every time it loads, which will slow down even a decent server by many orders of magnitude. Whatever process is responsible for the performance problem, I'd expect it to show up in task manager when you're waiting for the page to load. If you have 4 processors and the mcshield utilisation hits 25% for example, then that's where the problem is.

Right, I've got the spec of the intranet computer and sadly it looks quite dated with only a Pentium 4 2.8GHz CPU and 502MB RAM. It's an optiplex machine from about 10 years ago. The other machines seem to be more current.

Is it worth upgrading to 2GB RAM?

It also has a 40GB Seagate Barracuda 7200rpm HDD. Was thinking about SSD but the money would be coming out of my pocket for both things and don't want to spend £££ on SSD.

Half a gig should be fine for a LAMP instal, and unless your Intranet is huge then I imagine the disk will be fine too. You can always add more memory later after testing if you think it needs it.

I'll see if I can test it out by nicking some RAM from a computer and installing it. Wondered whether the intranet was pagefiling. Will check stats before and after as well as load times and then report back.

Increasing the RAM seemed to have a massive difference. Went to 2GB and the intranet loaded in about 3-4 seconds. Gone back to the 512MB of RAM and it's taking the usual 15-30 seconds.

Is that on the existing Windows server? In which case, yes - half a gig isn't enough even to run Windows, especially if it's running services other than the XAMP install.

Would be plenty for a stand alone Linux box though.

Too much effort. I would have to learn how to use Linux and look up commands again.

If I design a new intranet, I can put it in my portfolio for revalidation. Doubt I'd get anything for a Linux machine!

But you're a doctor, not a network engineer.

Damnit Jim!

Just occurred to me, that's the same spec as a Raspberry Pi. I bet you'd get the load time down to well under a second on one too

I did think about using the R-Pi for running a slideshow on a 42" LCD TV but we had two unused Revo machines so used them instead with Linux. Pain in the backside having to dig around for command lines for various functions eg stopping power savings/screensaver etc.

The intranet machine is also used for tutorials eg running presentations on various aspects of medicine, and connects up to a projector via VGA. Not sure if it has HDMI input.