Have you tried copying your site in the actual status to your own machine?.  Testing in our own controlled box could allow you to an easy debug.

Also, some hosting services are able to help you measuring database and ap.net

In my case, I asked WH4L to move my site to a better host and they helped me.

For the moment, you can try:

* Tet static html pages (with similar content as your DNN page) and measure load times

* Test .aspx files including the same content.

* Create a .aspx file that loops quering a database and measure start and finishing times. That could give you an idea where the problem is.

Run your site through the webpage analyzer at:

http://www.uptrends.com/aspx/free-html-site-page-load-check-tool.aspx

This analyzer will tell you the resolve time, connection time, and download time for each item in your webpage.  I have one page that is 1280kb that loads in 2.5 seconds.

Did you do the DNN install or did you have the hosting provider do the initial install?  If you had the hosting provider do the install grab the web.config file from a clean DNN install package that you can download here, download a copy of your current web.config file via FTP, and compare the two in a file comparison tool such as the free ExamDiff program. This will tell you if your hosting provider has included code that cripples DNN in order to fit more installs on a single server.  Look for Pooling="no" in your connection string or a database connection limit.  If you see somthing (other than your connection string) in your current web.config file that is not in the install package web.config file and don't know what it is ask about it in these forums. Any differences you find are most likely not to your benefit.

BobMan,

YSlow still indicates that images can gain up to 65% from "smushing" and performance could be enhanced by caching.

Caching will help with performance, but require additional RAM, i.e. it depends on your hosting environment. I usually prefer to set heavy caching in Host settings as well as gzip compression (don't turn on whitespace filter).