Neither ;) This is a site with an average of 200-300 queries per page (when cache has been cleared), look at the query count, it's 5, it's all cached. And the template compilation was not disabled ;)
Normally a page of that site takes 0.2s to generate on that server, today - without any changes made - it went to 20-40 seconds, and it was consistent over about 2 hours to show over 95% of resources used for this part. Then it went back to normal. I suspect something might be wrong with the server (it's a VPS), but I have no idea what to have checked by the provider ;(
I'm afraid I haven't seen this before. You should report it in the issue tracker, but it would help if it is reproducible somehow of course... :/
One thing from Kristof though: Check file permission on the cache files, if they suddenly change so the web server can't read it, that might explain it.
<i>I'm afraid I haven't seen this before. You should report it in the issue tracker, but it would help if it is reproducible somehow of course... :/</i> Looking for some consistency myself, but this simply happens, and then some minutes later is gone...
<i>One thing from Kristof though: Check file permission on the cache files, if they suddenly change so the web server can't read it, that might explain it.</i> Thanks. I'll give those a closer look. However - in all problems that I have experienced with permissions on different servers (can't read, can't write etc...), it has never taken that long... just like with pure PHP - file access errors take some additional time, but we're not talking minutes, right? ;)
run top on the server when it goes nuts, you might see something.
It reminds me a problem I had: the cache for the images was cleared, and it was regenerating all the images, I had enough image galleries to put the server on its knees (and I suspect it happily generates the same thumbnail several times for each request if two access simultaneously).