I'm currently working on optimizing my site to try to decrease load time by using Pingdom tools. I seem to be having some difficulty with long load times on images.

For example, the body background for my site is a 29kb file but takes almost 500 ms to load, the majority of which is spent connecting to the server. This one seems to take the longest times but other images seem to take a lot of time as well—the majority of which seems to be spent connecting to the server.

This also seems to fluctuate as I've seen the same image load in 500ms one minute and ten minutes later load in 1.5 seconds.

My site is using the Modx CMS but I'm not sure if that would affect this at all. Is it more likely that this is a server issue? Is there anything that I should check or do to help alleviate these inflated 'connect' times?