Very slow performance with apache on ubuntu VM

I'm having some problems with apache on my ubuntu linode instance, I was hoping somebody here might be able to help me out?

I've run a few diagnostics and tweaked MySQL and apache but the problem still persists

Apache is taking over 10 seconds to serve pages from Drupal, I think I've narrowed it down to a "waiting for connection problem.

I run apache2ctl status and can see that responses are taking a long time to be sent from apache to the requester. The status is showing a lot of "waiting for connection" items.

If I make a request to a URL, the first time it loads very slowly, if I then request the same page again and again straight after it comes through quickly. I've repeated this with wget from two different remote servers requesting the same URL and the result is the same.

I've run these diagnosis steps http://serverfault.com/questions/322671 … entoo-lamp">http://serverfault.com/questions/322671/long-waiting-times-before-apache-2-2-server-response-gentoo-lamp but the longest item on the list is 1.0014 seconds so I'm at a dead end now. Does anyone have any ideas what this might be? I'm pulling my remains of my hair out with this one.

Thanks