How do I explain the large difference between page execution time and reasonable query execution time? I believe that one of my websites is running rather slowly.  I have done nothing different than I have on other Drupal websites that I have done that are running on different servers and that are running much faster.  

Would this "slowness" be somehow described by the fact that the page takes 4 times longer to load than it does to actually execute the SQL queries? 


  Page execution time was 2251.03 ms. Executed 342 queries in 477.02 milliseconds.


If you see above, you can see that it takes more than 4 times longer to execute the page than it does to actually get the data it needs to show on the page.

I have another site that is nearly identical and I have much faster load times:


  Executed 241 queries in 108.32 milliseconds. Page execution time was 1065.35 ms.


What explains the difference between the two sites, and how could I go about fixing the slow site?
Here is an easy calculation:

page_execution_time = query_time + php_time;


So basically you seem to do quite a lot of stuff in php.
Same basic stuff you could do


Use some opcode cache, for example apc
Find out what needs a lot of time using xhprof