SharePoint sites do suffer from performance problems from time to time. Perhaps the link between clients and WFE’s is congested, or the architects didn’t quite anticipate the usage patterns of their users, or maybe the orbit Neptune is wrongly aligned to the galactic plane.
Quite often a large amount of the time SharePoint spends spinning that busy icon round and round in circles is due to the sheer amount of data and number of web parts involved in rendering a single web page. Most of which are probably fluff (for example, the company’s share price or logo). However, you can cut all but the essential data by browsing the “mobile site” instead from a regular browser.
To do this, simply add mobile=1 as a query parameter to the URL you’re trying to access. This works even for browsing content such as Word Documents (it’s not great, but it does its best, bless it).
Examples:
Home Page: http://www.example.com/?mobile=1
A Shared Documents Library: https://www.example.com/sites/Shared%20Documents/Forms/AllItems.aspx?mobile=1
I’ve tried this on several sites and been surprised at just how fast SharePoint can serve up the stuff that’s really important!