Apache2 does tons of reads before serving a simple http request response

Hi there. So I've got apache2 serving my php sites, and I recently wrote some node webapps, and realized that node was serving up http responses way quicker than apache2 (I had wrongly been assuming linode was to blame).

I ran ps auxw | grep sbin/apache | awk '{print " -p " $2}' | xargs strace -o apache2.log to look at what happens in apache2 when I send a request. In the browser, dev tools, network, I see that the initial request for my page (http://gerbus.ca/laststand) takes 7 seconds to receive a response.

In the strace http://gerbus.ca/apache2.log, I see a shit load of read lines, taking about 6 seconds (from 14:19:19 to 14:19:25). Anyone have an idea what's going on?