Causes of high network latency

I have a site that is moving incredibly slowly right now. Both Safari's inspector and Firebug are reporting that most of the load time is due to latency. The actual download is happening in less than a second. There's a lot of database activity in play (though the metrics on that indicate that it's pretty healthy), but what else can cause really high latency? Is it a purely network thing or are there changes I can make to the app to improve the latency numbers?

I'm using YSlow to help identify performance improvements, but on the whole, I don't see it reporting anything that seems crazy unreasonable. Opportunities for improvement, certainly, but nothing that seems like it would cause the huge load times I'm seeing.

Thanks.

UPDATE

Some background and metrics, in case it's useful. This is a CakePHP application and I'm using my UsersController::login action as the benchmark. For the sake of identifying how much of a factor the application code plays in this, I've printed a 开发者_运维知识库stacktrace immediately upon entering UsersController::beforeFilter(). Here's output:

UsersController::beforeFilter() - APP/controllers/users_controller.php, line 13
Controller::startupProcess() - CORE/cake/libs/controller/controller.php, line 522
Dispatcher::_invoke() - CORE/cake/dispatcher.php, line 187
Dispatcher::dispatch() - CORE/cake/dispatcher.php, line 171
[main] - APP/webroot/index.php, line 83

Load times, as shown by Safari's inspector range from 11.2 seconds to 52.2 seconds. This would seem to point me away from the application code and maybe something with my host, but maybe I'm completely misinterpreting this or oversimplifying it?

If you cannot identify directly a slow moving component of your application, there are a number of other steps along the way that can certainly slow your site down. Whenever I'm experiencing unusually long polling, I typically start by looking at the local DNS and then onto my hosted DNS. Sometimes a cache refresh (on their part, not yours) can cause a lot of polling until their database has caught up.

Else, they might actually have a service outage and your requests are being made to their secondary or backup server. If everything seems fine in terms of domain resolution, your hosting provider might be experiencing a service outage that can take a number of different shapes like serving static content from their backups or over-allocating shared resources until everything is running as it should. You can experience a ton of what they call throttling on shared cloud architectures when they have a box go down. On the plus side, you don't have a total outage in this circumstance.

One time, and this was just in a shared grid configuration, I had a processor go to hell. The bizarre part of it was that static content was still serving from a backup, but it was still polling against our database (which was on a different server) and causing our account to throttle because of over allocation on the backup. Wasn't our fault, but the host started sending nasty emails about our excessive long-polls. Moral of the story is, if it's not your application, and it's out of the blue, somewhere along the line I'll bet you'll find some hardware failure or misconfiguration.

Also now that I think of it, if you are syndicating some outside content (be it server or browser side) it might not be in your chain of responsibility altogether. If you are serving ads for example from a subscriber service, they might be having a high-load period or outage. These are just the steps that I would take to narrow down the culprit.

Probably this will be not the solution for you, but when I has doggy slow safari (and FF too) I simply changed the DNS servers to opendns (208.67.222.222, 208.67.220.220) and all my problems are resolved.