Joomla! Forum - community, help and support

I am having a problem with a menu item that leads to a category page list of 50 - 100 articles.

The debug profile information is puzzling:

Application 0.000 seconds (+0.000); 1.21 MB (+1.210) - afterLoad
Application 0.096 seconds (+0.095); 9.77 MB (+8.557) - afterInitialise
Application 0.400 seconds (+0.305); 26.34 MB (+16.576) - afterRoute
Application -250.697 seconds (+-251.097); 31.40 MB (+5.056) - afterDispatch
Application -250.678 seconds (+0.019); 32.03 MB (+0.632) - beforeRenderModule mod_jw_srfr (Newsfeeds)

Overall, the site is performing pretty well, but these links to category listings are a big problem.

Anything I can check to fix this?

[BEGIN VENTING]

We are going through the exact same misery.
I believe Joomla 2.5 has some deep design flaws that no one cared to address so far. Flaws that most likely had made it into Joomla 3.0.
I've been using Joomla since the Mambo times and may drop it soon precisely because of this type of performance issues. Developers in this community seem to care more about cosmetic details like the Bootstrap interface than the core flaws we have been reporting over the years. Truly frustrating.
Unless you fix these shortcomings yourself, expect no plausible answer this type of problems because there is none.
You may get the usual bullshit paternalistic mantra for the mentally challenged. You know, turn off gzip compression, enable cache, take your dog for a walk and so forth. Pure baloney.
Joomla is underperforming and not ready for large sites. This is the sad truth.

For the record, we have several layers of cache and we use Cloudflare. The site was doing more or less fine when we had ono one category with 20,000+ articles. A soon as we created more categories, kaboom!

[/END VENTING]

This issue has been resolved, although I cannot point to one specific thing that fixed it.

On the assumption that something was corrupted (due to extensive install/uninstall of various components), we rebuilt the site and imported only the content.
Another thing was we changed hosts.

The performance difference in moving from InMotion to LiquidWeb was stunning.

Our pages now regularly serve in under 0.6 seconds - including that problem category.

Good to know. In our case, it boils down to deficient query implementation in the Related articles module.
Trying to dynamically relate articles in large sites brings MySQL to its knees, no matter how primed the settings are. Even the indexation of critical columns won't do much.
In the end we have disabled the Related Articles module altogether.

I feel so frustrated with Joomla 2.5 sites, they use so much resources. I work with Joomla since Mambo days but it looks to me like using Joomla 2.5 for web sites is like using Atomic Bomb to kill 1 mosquito.

And nobody complains about this, like Open Source become Microsoft Club - doesn't matter the resources used as long as it works.