I have a website that fetches approximately 20 pages, each page is different. Currently, it takes about 1.2 minutes to load.
Some days back this task only took 11-15 seconds. Now it takes 1.2 minutes. What can be the reason for sudden change?
Is there any solution other than merging some of these to reduce the number of requests? Can the limit of number of requests be somehow altered?

The above screenshot is from Firebug. the gray portions of the bars represent “Blocking”.
Somebody should have suggested me to use multi-CURL instead. In that I just need to make a call to a single PHP file and that will automatically call to each one of them, that too in parallel.
Take a look here