I have inherited an internal site built on DotNetNuke, appears to be version 04.08.02. The problem we are having is that the response time for pages being served up is slow. With that very limited description, any ideas on what I may look at for insight as to how to increase speed? I can provide more background.....

On an internal site with no internet lag response times should be no more that 1-2 seconds on even a heavily loaded machine.

But first a couple of questions
 - what windows platform is the hosting running under?
 - how much ram does the machine have
 - is MS SQL installed on the same machine.

Next, is there a backup plan running for MS SQL that includes a regular shrink process

Also, how often do you clear the dnn event log ?

And finally - do you happen to have AVG 2011 installed on the computer hosting your webserver ( it is evil - and will bring any webserver to a crawl)

Westa

8 seconds is still way to long.  Sounds like there is still some sort of core issue happening.

If you look in the DNN sites event log - are there any events that say something along the lines of - Application Restart - or Application Shutdown by environment.

All asp.net sites suffer a small hit the first time you visit a site, as the application worker process is started and core components validated and pre-compiled among other things.  Once this has occurred the application should stay alive and these actions not occur again - UNTIL about 20 minutes after the last query to the site.  The thing I would be looking for is any indications that the application pool is being stopped by the server or restarted.

This can occur if the application is using more memory than the host has allocated, or if the application pool is set to timeout in to quickly.

Westa