[NiteWave]

SQL is on the same server, and have never experienced the problem of taking time to "warm up". If such is the case, I find it odd it would only occur in conjunction with LS.

if there are hundreds of databases in the SQL server, for 1st access of a low traffic site, it need load the database from hard disk into memory, and this may take long time if a)memory is not enough or b)disk I/O happen to be high at that time. for 2nd request which has database access, since the database already in memory, so no loading overhead and response fast. so please monitor the database performance as well and enable slow query log. also good idea to monitor the disk io and disk swap status. if disk swap happen, it's sure you'll feel the slowness of a website.