Page load of website slow after installation

Dear all,

I have recently installed piwik (version 2.0.3). I use a shared hosting service on apache/linux to which I do not have access to update things like php or mysql.

The loading of piwik itself on my site seems very slow (over 30 seconds) and I did the right thing and searched these forums and came up with some advice about changing the config file to: session_save_handler = dbtable

I did this because I saw the following in my server log:


[Thu Feb 06 12:55:30 2014] [error] [client 64.39.111.93:58935] AH01276: Cannot serve directory /home/sites/tarkacomputercare.co.uk/public_html/piwik/misc/: No matching DirectoryIndex (index.php) found, and server-generated directory index forbidden by Options directive
tarkacomputercare.co.uk [Thu Feb 06 12:55:30 2014] [error] [client 64.39.111.93:59032] AH01797: client denied by server configuration: /home/sites/tarkacomputercare.co.uk/public_html/piwik/plugins/index.php
tarkacomputercare.co.uk [Thu Feb 06 12:55:32 2014] [error] [client 64.39.111.93:59464] AH01797: client denied by server configuration: /home/sites/tarkacomputercare.co.uk/public_html/piwik/tmp/

this seems to have already been set in my config file. Here is an extract:

; <?php exit; ?> DO NOT REMOVE THIS LINE
; file automatically generated or modified by Piwik; you can manually override the default values in global.ini.php by redefining them in this file.
.
.
.
[General]
session_save_handler = "dbtable"
trusted_hosts[] = “www.tarkacomputercare.co.uk
.
.

.

I no longer see these or any other errors in my server log. The last entry in it is from 12:55:32 and the time now is 14:41:00

Despite this the piwik interface is still slow to load.

However… Of more concern is the time it takes for my website to load.
It used to be a few seconds (maybe 3 or 4) for a 1st load but now it is is nearly 20 seconds before I get the full load. I used http://www.webpagetest.org/ to see what was going on and it showed that request 7 was taking forever. This seems to be the script for piwik:

here is the report: WebPagetest Test Details

[i]URL: http://www.tarkacomputercare.co.uk/piwik/piwik.php?action_name=Expert%20Computer%20Repairs%20for%20Bideford%20Barnstaple%20Torrington%20Ilfracombe&idsite=1&rec=1&r=339265&h=14&m=19&s=41&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.tarkacomputercare.co.uk%2F&_id=5fb9483c501f8ec7&_idts=1391696382&_idvc=1&_idn=1&_refts=0&_viewts=1391696382&res=1920x1440

Host: www.tarkacomputercare.co.uk
IP: 217.199.187.64
Location: United Kingdom
Error/Status Code: 200
Client Port: 4008
Start Offset: 1.547 s
DNS Lookup: 0 ms
Initial Connection: 0 ms
SSL Negotiation: 0 ms
Time to First Byte: 19221 ms
Content Download: 6 ms
Bytes In (downloaded): 0.2 KB
Bytes Out (uploaded): 0.7 KB[/i]

Can anyone advise please?

Thanks
Paul