Only receiving one document at a time from new web server

We're trying to move our internal ticketing system from a Microsoft Small Business Server in the server closet to a Rackspace Cloud Server. The install is Fedora 11 LAMP, and should be default out of the box, except for the vhosts appended to the bottom of the httpd.conf.

The new server is suffering from crippling load times, and watching the page load in Firebug it's easy to see the problem occurring, but I can't figure out the cause.

Here is the old server: old server http://rkuykendall.com/uploads/old.server.png

I was expecting something like this, but a little slower since it was no longer hosted locally. Instead, the new server: new server http://rkuykendall.com/uploads/new.server.png

appears to only serve one file at a time. Here's another example of this staircase load time effect: staircase load time effect http://rkuykendall.com/uploads/staircase.png

and another very clear example of the staircase effect: staircase effect 2 http://rkuykendall.com/uploads/staircase2.png

I talked to some guys on Freenode #httpd with no luck. I created a duplicate server to play with, and also created a fresh server with Fedora Core 13 and moved over just the database and web files with no luck.

Any suggestions?

We figured it out! It was an IPTables configuration problem.

We spun up yet another test server to try to find the problem, this time CentOS. The problem wasn't presenting, so we turned on IPTables to begin switching to the new server. Upon enabling IPTables, the problem returned. We investigated the config file and found -m limit --limit 1/s in the configuration.

Removing -m limit --limit 1/s from our iptables configuraton solved the problem presented.