We're trying to move our internal ticketing system from a Microsoft Small Business Server in the server closet to a Rackspace Cloud Server. The install is Fedora 11 LAMP, and should be default out of the box, except for the vhosts appended to the bottom of the httpd.conf.

The new server is suffering from crippling load times, and watching the page load in Firebug it's easy to see the problem occurring, but I can't figure out the cause.

Here is the [old server] (http://rkuykendall.com/uploads/old.server.png). I was expecting something like this, but a little slower since it was no longer hosted locally. Instead, the [new server] (http://rkuykendall.com/uploads/new.server.png) appears to only serve one file at a time. Here's another example of this [staircase load time effect] (http://rkuykendall.com/uploads/staircase.png) and another very clear example of the [staircase effect] (http://rkuykendall.com/uploads/staircase2.png).

I talked to some guys on Freenode #httpd with no luck. I created a duplicate server to play with, and also created a fresh server with Fedora Core 13 and moved over just the database and web files with no luck.

Any suggestions?

( image links disabled due to n00b-spam-restrictions )