blockcategories slowing down site

[gennybeans]

Hey everyone!

 

So I've done some searching, and I've tried some solutions posted on here, but haven't really been able to get this issue fixed.

 

I contacted my host about slow load times, as I was noticing that on our cPanel the Server Load was well over 20 at times (1cpu).

 

I received a report back saying that category.php was using up a lot of memory and it was recommended that I optimize the script.

 

Just a little background:

 

I have smarty enabled, ccc is all checked off except for high risk HTML, force compile is disabled, and I am not using Memcache. My php.ini file says that memory_limit is set to 128MB. I am running version 1.4.5.1.

 

There are times when I'll get lightning fast speeds, but the majority of the time, pingdom gives me a 61/100 rating.

 

The URL is www.melmira.com

 

Any thoughts/suggestions would be greatly appreciated.