[rt-users] "time to display" wrong - where is delay?

[Boldra]

Hi, after optimizing our rt installation with mason caching, hiding 
things in the session, query optimizing and so on, I've got our average 
"time to display" values nice and low (rarely more than 3 seconds).  
However the users still aren't happy, because the numbers don't reflect 
their experience. 

My own testing has confirmed that although the page display value might 
be 4 seconds, the time it takes to completely fetch the html for the 
page (via LWP) is up to 90 seconds!  (possibly longer, but I've set 
certain timeouts at this limit).  I think I've eliminated the 
possibility of a network problem by fetching the pages from the same 
machine that's serving them,  and since it's only fetching html it can't 
be due to image load times.  I'm also not rendering the html, just 
fetching it.

Naturally I'm looking at our webserver config, and in particular 
fastcgi.  What I'm hoping someone here can tell me is; what else is 
happening between the initialization of $m->{rt_base_time} in the 
autohandler and the rendering of the number in /Elements/Footer?  Is it 
possible my mason caching is slowing something down (something 
filesystem-bound)? 

I appreciate any suggestions!

Paul Boldra