Very slow loading of Dashboard

[steph.hope]

For some time (a couple of months ish) I've been experiencing very slow loads (around 2 minutes!) sometimes when navigating to the dashboard. This tends to happen every few hours throughout the day and load times are fine in between. It's similar to the below issue:

Earlier today I noticed that the System Health widget takes a long time to reload, so thought it might be the culprit and removed it from the dashboard, but just now had another slow loading incident. I'd be grateful for any other suggestions on what could be causing this - we're hoping to go live with WHMCS reasonably soon and these load times will be unacceptable then.

(incidentally, the System Health page itself is also always slow to load, is this normal?)

[HostMaria]

.. huhh.. 2 minutes is a lot.. you could have some ddos protection running, but even in cases like these it doesn't take 2 minutes - usually 3-10 sec.

.. does the screen say anything or is it completely blank?

[steph.hope]

Looks like it was definitely something to do with the System Health widget. Deactivating it from the menu on the dashboard didn't help but commenting out the whole widget code means I haven't seen this issue in almost 24 hours. Hope it's not just a fluke it continues to work well.

Now, I've just gotta figure out what it is about System Health that causes issues...