"Confirm Order" Taking too much time.

Hello and thank you in advance for the input and assistance!

I have tested this in OC 1.5 and the 2.1.0.1 and 2.1.0.2 on several of our own testing sights, I do have a dedi server and have followed all the speed advice and the cart is really fast start to finish. The finish is where the problem is, it takes exactly 30 seconds from the time "Confirm Order" is clicked until the success message is returned. What makes this worse is we are using a vendor module and when it is enabled and sends an email to the vendor that adds on an additional 30 seconds. That module has an option to send the customer a PDF and that takes an additional 30 seconds. I have changed the settings in "mail" under the settings in OC to "mail" and "SMTP" with correct info, I have tried lower -f, large case -F, adding sendmail_path = /usr/sbin/sendmail -t -i; to the ini files and nothing will speed up that 30 seconds, the mail works fine it is just too slow for a customer to wait that long for a confirmation.

Will someone please see if this is just the standard time OC takes on their own server? Is there a way to speed this up or throw a confirmation page ahead of time, maybe a popup or jquery of sorts? Any ideas or input is most welcomed. We have nearly got this thing squared away with all the modules working great and are ready to launch but this is the last hiccup.

which payment gateway are you using?

That's an unusual delay. Where are you sending the confirmation? How is payment done since it sounds like the gateway as the responder above mentioned.

Although I'm on a heavily-modded 2.0.3.1, we use a similar vendor system (Dropship) that sends an automatic pdf order via email for fulfillment and it doesn't slow our testing site down at all. Confirmation is virtually instantaneous and the emails fly out to the consumer and our admin and the dropshipper in less time than it takes us to open the email system to see if they arrived. Granted, we're still testing with internal payments (bank transfers) and PayPal Sandbox. No live outside gateways yet.

Next step is to test with live PayPal Standard.