Just acknowledging that the server has had some spotty performance recently. I'm unable to figure out the cause but continuously investigating.

We now have two load balanced servers, and I can establish that it's not specific to either server. I've updated the load balancer with caching settings which should help alleviate a little (public images now will get cached and not have to go through PHP and database queries).

The database is showing no performance issues that I can see, when the page lags the database queries are not.

Additionally, the server lag appears to be random and per request (as in another identical request made at the same time doesn't lag).

My focus is going to be on examining the PHP-FPM service on both nodes, they're both reporting slow execution.