I've got a site, www.arcade-o-rama.com, that has a lot of thumbnails on the main page. According to the site tools.pingdom.com, there are two times when it loads that it seems to pause for 9 seconds. I'm trying various things to fix it, but so far, it stays exactly the same, always pausing twice for 9 seconds (the test times out, so I don't know whether it would keep pausing for 9 seconds at regular intervals). Can someone help me figure out what this 9 second pause is coming from?
i dont think this is down to images, it may be your server. i'm guessing the dynamic content is below the search panel and this seems to be where the hold up is. perhaps your mysql server is querying too slowly?
You can try to validate your site thru W3C (Check your site here). When I checked it you had 186 errors an 27 warnings. It may help you a bit with your speed issue.
I just saw . There are 3 swf banners on your site. I think that is also an issue. check the file size of your swf banners. I think there are some images used in it . Those images are too bigger in size. Actually that banner don't need that resolution size of image.
Looks to me like there's no obvious problem, just a sizable amount of content and a few slower ads. The JavaScript ad code delays the page rendering more than images, so for the fastest rendering of content you could try to move the JS as late in the page as possible, or even load it after the page renders with an event handler, if that's supported by the ad provider.