thanks! I've disabled the display most things on the front end and its behaving better but still slow.
"We were unable to get your stats just now. Please reload this page to try again."
this is the jetpack site stats thing. It never used to timeout or have issues but since 3.8, I get this all the time. lots of problems. Its got to do with 3.8.
anyhow, I'll try the P3 Profiler.
Thanks WPRanger!