Scripts are fast locally, but slow on remote server

PHP list, I have a set of PHP scripts that seem to be efficient and quick enough both on my home testing environment, and a few different web-hosting services I use. However, on one particular web-hosting service, there is often a very painful 10 second (!) lag when first loading up the scripts. This long lag time can sometimes be manifest not just on the first page loaded, but the second and maybe third as well. But then after the first initial pages are loaded, the site seems to speed up to what I would consider normal download pages for times. There are some pages on the site that are not driven by these PHP scripts, and they load up very quickly, indicating that only my PHP scripts are affected. So the problem seems to be, as far as I can tell, that something about my PHP scripts is combining with some setting of this one web-hosting server to create some kind of slowdown. Is there any way I can diagnose a situation like this to get to the root of the problem? Perhaps there are common discrepancies between server settings that I can look out for? Any advice would be much appreciated. Thank you. -- Dave M G Articlass - open source CMS http://articlass.org