I hope that's not ironic. If something has happen without any reason, you haven't changed any settings etc - then there is no reason to think that template has anything to do with speed problem. Especially when the problem is with generating of html content which lies on speed of php processing entire Joomla code to generate html code. I can bet, that even if you would change template to default (Beeze) the problem will resists.
Hope this will help more.