Sorry my question is so vague I just have no idea where to start in solving it and am quite a novice with servers.

Recently my site (an https connection, running on an Amazon EC2 ubuntu apache2.2) has this issue where I need to load the page several times (3-4) before it will load normally without issue. It will then load normally as long as I keep loading pages regularly (every couple seconds). It will stall again if I don't load pages for a few minutes.

It has nothing to do with my application because I don't have this problem with the exact same app codebase on my Apache installation on my laptop.

The only thing to my knowledge that I changed is that I installed mod_pagespeed https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/mod. However, I have since turned it off by setting my pagespeed.conf to mod_pagespeed off. Unfortunately, that didn't solve the problem.

I'm wondering general advice on how to troubleshoot this problem. For instance are there linux commands to check page loading peformance? Also, it looks like I have lots of new error.logs in my /var/log/apache2 directory which i believe weren't there a few months ago.

lots of this :

error.log         RewriteLog.log.24.gz       ssl_access.log.40.gz
error.log.1       RewriteLog.log.25.gz       ssl_access.log.41.gz
error.log.10.gz   RewriteLog.log.26.gz       ssl_access.log.42.gz
error.log.11.gz   RewriteLog.log.27.gz 

any thoughts? thank you, tim