I compiled my app in release mode. I then went ahead and 'published' the site.
Copies all files and moved them to a staging server with a static ip. Restarted IIS.
Went to another machine and hit my web site. It took about 4 seconds for just the default page, which is pure HTML with no custom framework usage, to show up. What gives???
Sounds like it is just the application pool spinning up. Assuming that you are the first person to hit it after deployment, this isn't uncommon. It appears fine after the first page hit, correct?
If you set the @Page directive variable "Trace=True" does that show you any load times which out out of place? Also, if you are connected to a database, running SQL Profiler for example will show you any database queries which are too slow.
Lastly, I had a strange issue where I had a virtual directory setup which pointed to a directory that didn't exist. The network timeout that ocurred looking it up took a while.