Your box might be starting to “grind” using swap space memory after awhile (i.e. running low on RAM), that might explain both being slow. If your question is whether the initial request is a network weirdness, you could leave a console logged in “for quite awhile” (until you anticipate the problem) then run a curl command like $ curl http://localhost:port/my_page and see if that’s fast or not (since it doesn’t do any outside networking). It’ll probably be slow…