“posting” to my database freezes my site but still posts

I am hoping someone can help me out. My site has been running fine for months without any issues. Its not that busy and only receives maybe 1500 page views per day.

There are no issues with the loading speed of the actual site while clicking through pages and surfing and same with the admin section, all is acceptable.

All of a sudden today without me adding any new plugins or upgrades to WordPress I can no longer “post” anything to my database anymore without it locking up the entire screen.

For example when I am writing a post and want to save a draft, if I click the save button then my browsers freezes while trying to load my site. The exact same behaviour happens when writing comments, deleting comments, publishing/deleting content…. basically any interaction with modifying the database.

The strange thing is that whatever you are trying to save/post/delete does get done right away… it just gets stuck for about 3-5 minutes before finally loading.

This just started happening out of no where .. was working fine one moment.. created a new post.. then went back to edit the post and its been like this for hours now. Im on a VPS linux with only a couple other static html sites.

I have rebooted the server, optmized/repaired the mysql database for this site and nothing helps. I also installed a test copy of WordPress to another folder and tested its interaction with the database and it is fine. I really don’t want to have to start all over ??

any help would be appreciated