title: Apache Site Slow To Load, possibly allowoverride or rewrite issue
body: <p>I am finding that my websites are slow to load the first page but is fine after that, some experimenting with apache configuration suggests one of the following maybe the issue:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li><p><strong>AllowOverride</strong> - I know having AllowOverride set to All can slow a site down as it looks for .htaccess files in every folder so I moved the configuration into the virtual hosts file and made AllowOverride None thus turning off .htaccess files, this initially seemed to solve the problem but when I tried it again the problem returned so maybe it wasn't that.</p></li>
  <li><p>I removed the AllowOverride line so it defaults back to the default setting for this (none). This seemed to help but again it still occurs at times.</p></li>
  <li><p>It could be the rewrite rules which are:</p>
  
  <pre><code>RewriteEngine On              
  
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(.+\.)?example\.com/.*$ [NC]
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !google. [NC]
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !search?q=cache [NC]
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !msn. [NC]
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !yahoo. [NC]
  RewriteRule ^.*$ - [F]    
  
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -s [OR]
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -l [OR]
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
  RewriteRule ^.*$ - [NC,L]
  RewriteRule ^.*$ index.php [NC,L]
  </code></pre></li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>However some sites don't use this and in fact don't even use rewrites and are still slow so this doesn't seem to be the problem either.</p>
  
  <p>Any ideas?</p>
  
  <p><strong>Edited:</strong></p>
  
  <p>It is not the site that is the issue as even a simple HTML that only has "Hello World" has issues.</p>
  
  <p>It was working fine on previous versions of Apache but since the upgrade to 2.4 (when a lot of things changed especially configuarations) it has become slow.</p>