Bought a website: www.sciencedreams.com which is using Joomla, K2, custom template and lot's of components.

I wasn't aware of this (always used Wordpress) and after having website transferred to my dedicated Hostgator server (Intel Xeon Quadcore 2.5ghz + 4GB ram) i noticed the website is running awfully slow.

Have several other websites (all wordpress) running on the server and never causes any troubles. Those websites together receive about 5k visitors a day. ScienceDreams.com only receives about 1k visitors daily and frontpage takes 20+ seconds to load. Some article pages are a little faster, but nothing compared to Wordpress.

I'm really new to Joomla / K2 and not sure where to start debugging this? My plan was even to make a static website for now as i think visitors will never come back to such slow site.

Things done:
- enabled cache in Joomla
- disabled gzip
- contacted Hostgator support, they did some test and replied with "The problem is that this K2 component and it's modules are just slamming CPU on the server. Despite caching, they continue to work very hard on every page load." and adviced me to contact this forum!

Hope this is something simple to solve, or is my server just to light-weighted for Joomla / K2?

Hi. Some things to do:

1. Update your Joomla! installation to the latest stable version available for your series ( 1.5.26 for Joomla! 1.5, 2.5.18 for Joomla! 2.5 and 3.2.2 for Joomla! 3.2 series.).

2. Update K2. I saw that you are running a really old version of K2, almost 3 years behind. Note that many things have changed since then so it is highly recommended to take a backup of your site before performing the update. Ideally you should perform the update in a development environment and then push the changes online.

3. Make sure you have set a reasonable expiration time for Joomla! caching.

4. Enable the System - Cache plugin. This adds an extra layer of caching to your Joomla! site.

5. I saw that you are using JoomlaXTC module in your site. This is not part of K2. Of course you can keep using this instead of the bundled K2 content module but this may also be the reason your site is so slow.