Joomla 1.5 on WampServer 2.2E loads slowly, shows blank page - php

Question

I have a Lenovo Thinkpad running Win7 Pro 64 bit, on which I've installed Wampserver 2.2E 64 bit. I've installed a copy of a Joomla 1.5 site which I want to upgrade; my plan is to test the upgrade process on the laptop. I can load the Localhost page and phpMyAdmin with no trouble, but when I try to load the Joomla site, it takes over 5 minutes to load (I timed it) and then displays a blank page.
Because I run IIS7.5 on port 80 to support another test site, I've configured Wampserver apache to run on port 8080, and the apache logs show that it is listening on that port. The error log doesn't actually show any errors, here's a typical Apache startup:
[Mon Nov 25 17:41:20 2013] [notice] Server built: May 13 2012 19:41:17
[Mon Nov 25 17:41:20 2013] [notice] Parent: Created child process 2680
[Mon Nov 25 17:41:20 2013] [notice] Child 2680: Child process is running
[Mon Nov 25 17:41:20 2013] [notice] Child 2680: Acquired the start mutex.
[Mon Nov 25 17:41:20 2013] [notice] Child 2680: Starting 64 worker threads.
[Mon Nov 25 17:41:20 2013] [notice] Child 2680: Starting thread to listen on port 8080.
The PHP error log is blank and always has been. The mySQL log also looks normal (latest startup):
131125 17:41:20 [Note] Plugin 'FEDERATED' is disabled.
131125 17:41:20 InnoDB: The InnoDB memory heap is disabled
131125 17:41:20 InnoDB: Mutexes and rw_locks use Windows interlocked functions
131125 17:41:20 InnoDB: Compressed tables use zlib 1.2.3
131125 17:41:20 InnoDB: Initializing buffer pool, size = 128.0M
131125 17:41:20 InnoDB: Completed initialization of buffer pool
131125 17:41:20 InnoDB: highest supported file format is Barracuda.
131125 17:41:20 InnoDB: Waiting for the background threads to start
131125 17:41:21 InnoDB: 1.1.8 started; log sequence number 1595685
131125 17:41:21 [Note] Server hostname (bind-address): '(null)'; port: 3306
131125 17:41:21 [Note] - '(null)' resolves to '::';
131125 17:41:21 [Note] - '(null)' resolves to '0.0.0.0';
131125 17:41:21 [Note] Server socket created on IP: '0.0.0.0'.
131125 17:41:21 [Note] Event Scheduler: Loaded 0 events
131125 17:41:21 [Note] wampmysqld: ready for connections.
Version: '5.5.24-log' socket: '' port: 3306 MySQL Community Server (GPL)
I've been researching this problem for several days and have tried a number of changes, none of which has had any effect. Here's my list of failed tries:
Made following changes to httpd.conf and php.ini:
EnableMMAP on
EnableSendfile on
Enable and set realpath_cache_size= 4m to your php.ini file
(It turns out I had only set the size; enabling means uncommenting the previous line in php.ini. I think. Uncommenting the line doesn't seem to have any effect.)
Uncommented this line in \etc\hosts: ::1 localhost (have since recommented as it had no effect.)
Adding the line 127.0.0.1 127.0.0.1 to \etc\hosts. Have since removed; had no effect.
Replacing localhost with 127.0.0.1 in httpd.conf
Verified that the system nameservers are not hardcoded and are being pulled from the DHCP server. For the record our router's nameservers are
68.94.156.1 dnsr1.sbcglobal.net and 68.94.157.1 dnsr2.sbcglobal.net
Configured mysql.default_host and mysqli.default_host (in php.ini) to localhost, then to 127.0.0.1; neither had any effect.
Can anyone suggest something that I haven't tried? This smells like a problem with php or mysql but neither one is logging any problems.

Answer 1

I am not sure if this is the problem in your case as I am not actually sure what you are doing, but Joomla installs normally take quite a chunk of processing time.
You normally need to increase the execution time to get them to complete properly.
Try setting max_execution_time = 300 in the php.ini file and restarting Apache
Of course if that works, remember to set max_execution_time back to something sensible, no more that 60.