OK, I've manged to confuse the problem. So:
1. The 'apps' are basic run-of-the-mill websites. Nothing fancy. 2. We tested it on a local machine with RHEL 5/PHP 5/MySQL 5. 3. The php.ini and httpd.conf files were suitably edited. 4. Yes, *it does work without a glitch* from my connection (Triband) and my colleague's connection (cable net - Fivenet - Kurla). I have no logical explanation. 5. My colleague is the only senior and he comes from an ASP/IIS background. On this, we are equals.
The problem seems to be (in layman's term) 'catching a file from the filesystem'. And it was detected on the local machine, but we didn't anticipate it to blow up like this.
When we upload a new website module to the server, then the problem shows up - page taking a long time to load, etc. We go home and check - its working fine. And its working fine when seen from office by the second session the next day.
In fact, PHPMyAdmin has also stabilized mostly. So has Awstats.
We face similar problem in FTP - I tried to download a SQL dump file - the speed was abysmal and the download had to be aborted.
I compared the response headers (www.redboxrewards.com).
From my home and office respectively:
**** Date Wed, 31 Oct 2007 15:04:59 GMT Server Apache/2.2.3 (Red Hat) X-Powered-By PHP/5.1.6 Set-Cookie PHPSESSID=gd13u9u09n9cehnb951m8v1ok2; path=/ Expires Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT Cache-Control no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0 Pragma no-cache Content-Encoding gzip Vary Accept-Encoding Content-Length 3314 Keep-Alive timeout=30, max=1000 Connection Keep-Alive Content-Type text/html; charset=UTF-8 **** Date Mon, 05 Nov 2007 07:06:57 GMT Server Apache/2.2.3 (Red Hat) X-Powered-By PHP/5.1.6 Set-Cookie PHPSESSID=trlhc2cnh0pvtng35idgj0ek60; path=/ Expires Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT Cache-Control no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0 Pragma no-cache Vary Accept-Encoding Content-Length 17153 Content-Type text/html; charset=UTF-8 X-Cache MISS from sigma X-Cache-Lookup MISS from sigma:3128 Connection keep-alive **** It looks like the the Squid proxy isn't asking for gzipped data.