I have a home server running in my basement: apache 2.x, FC5.

When I access www.mywebsite.com from the web, it always loads slowly, but the thing is, it does not seem to just be a slow connection... I'm not really sure what is going on.

My site has a good number of thumbnails and images, and when they load they download fast, but they download in groups. I will have 5 to 10 images download in less than a second, then there will be a 2 or three second gap, then I will get another 5 to 10 images in under a second. then more lag... and so on. it takes 15 or 20 seconds for my small site to load

I've tried the usual suspects like moving to a static page from the dynamic php/sql one, optomizing the image size in photoshop, etc, but i think my connection settings need some tweaking or something.

what can i do to speed up the loading of my site?
help!

If you are using Firefox:

Increase your cache size. Go to menu Edit->Preferences, then click on the Advanced button at the top, then click on the Network tab. Set the cache size to 500MB. This prevents periodic stalling, as Firefox's cache garbage collection appears brain damaged.

To keep the cache under control, click on the Privacy button at the top of the Preferences dialog, then check "Always clear my private data when I close Firefox" and uncheck "Ask me before clearing private data". Then click the Settings button, and make sure everything except Cookies and Saved Passwords is checked. Click the OK button and then the Close button.

To further speed up browsing, enter "about:config" in the web page address, and hit enter. In the Filter line at the top, enter "pipe" and hit enter. Double-click on "network.http.pipelining" to set it to "true". Double-click on "network http.pipelining.maxrequests" and set the value to 64. Click the OK button, and then close all web browser windows. This will allow Firefox to make multiple requests per connection to the web server, instead of sending them one at a time.

The changes will take effect the next time you start Firefox.

First, see if it is a connection problem or not. If you can, access the page from the local intranet. If it loads slow, then probably it's your computer. Dude, are you sure your 80 and 8080 ports are open for mapping? Again, if you're using an ADSL connection, then the download/upload ratio is very big, this means you have a low upload speed. Try to run as few background tasks and daemons as you can. How about running it without the X server started?