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Try to increase PHP memory limit. In conf/_advanced.php uncomment the following line, I recommend 64M

ini_set( 'memory_limit', '32M' );

You may also want to enable debugging in the same file $debug = 1, and post the timings here.

Are you on GoDaddy? Their shared hosting is pretty slow

thanks for those tips, I'm definitely going to look into that and get back. Yea with Godaddy, both me and my partner have been less than excited about their service.