yay, blog is now a-ok. did an upgrade of suphp to version 0.6.2 and the php executable doesn’t hang anymore. was also looking at installing fastcgi for the heck of it, but that didn’t work out. too complicated for such a simple problem.
in any case, what helped me was this firefox addon called firebug. helps you debug your websites, and i believe even lets you change code on the fly to see how it’s like. if you’re a website owner, you’ll love this! it actually helped me isolate which php script was taking long to load. 🙂 and of course, it’s free!