Apache 2 slow to respond

Hello, all.

I have a Red Hat 9 web server. Here are the hardware stats:

PIII 550
380MB Ram
40 G IDE drive
10/100 3Com NIC
RR cable net access

Here's my problem, I go to my web site and it takes 5 - 8 seconds to
load. As soon as the page loads, any other page request is loaded
really fast (less then a second). It doesn't matter if I use the FQDN
or my web server's local IP. So it doesn't look to be DNS related. I
checked the BIOS settings for the box (which is a dell optiplex) and
verified that the hardware is not being powered down for power
savings. The only thing I can think of is that there is some setting
inside RH 9 that powers down the drive but for the life of me I can't
find it. I tried the documentation and couldn't find the info I need
even though I'm sure it's there. I also tried to search the
newsgroups and didn't see an old post related to this topic that would
help.

Could anyone help me out? I'm sure it's a simple setting somewhere
but I just can't find the blasted thing. Any help I could get I would
appreciate very much.

kbk00@yahoo.com (ken) said:
>I have a Red Hat 9 web server. Here are the hardware stats:
....
>40 G IDE drive
....
>Here's my problem, I go to my web site and it takes 5 - 8 seconds to
>load. As soon as the page loads, any other page request is loaded
>really fast (less then a second). It doesn't matter if I use the FQDN
>or my web server's local IP. So it doesn't look to be DNS related. I
>checked the BIOS settings for the box (which is a dell optiplex) and
>verified that the hardware is not being powered down for power
>savings. The only thing I can think of is that there is some setting
>inside RH 9 that powers down the drive but for the life of me I can't
>find it.

So, more a Linux question than a webserver question, so I'm directing
followups to comp.os.linux.hardware .

See "hdparm" manual page, to find out how to control your drive behaviour.

.... but then, this _might_ also be DNS related, if there's anything that
causes your server to do DNS reverse lookups of the client address
(are you limiting access to something by host names instead of IP
addresses? Are you attempting to log visitor DNS names somewhere?
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