"C" TTFB and "F" cache static content

Web Performance Discuss Test Results
1

Please check out my website at http://www.leicaplace.com

My dedicated server specs:
Intel Xeon E5-2640 v2 (8 cores)
32GB RAM (1866 MHz)
240GB SolidFire (Cloud) SSD
Litespeed webserver (4 cores)
Varnish cache (Unixy plugin)

Site software: vBulletin 4.2.x with Xcache

I have set .htaccess as advised here to cache static assets: http://ozzmodz.com/showthread.php/1363-Quick-and-easy-way-to-leverage-browser-caching-of-static-assets

I can’t seem to do much better than a “C” for TTGB and an “F” for cache static content. What am I missing?

2

FYI, the test result urls are permanent so you can paste those instead of screenshots: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/150113_WM_12F8/1/performance_optimization/#cache_static_content

It looks like most of the issues are with skimresources.com and not directly from your server (and some with ads).

3

Thanks, I see what you mean, now. So I have to choose between speed and money :). That explains my “F” grade for cache static content.

How about my “C” TTFB - anything I can do about that?

4

It looks like your site is running through a varnish accelerator of some kind - is it acting as a CDN as well? That is a common case for making the TTFB appear slower than WebPagetest thinks it should be because it is connecting very quickly to the CDN edge node but that then needs to connect back to the actual server and that all shows up in the TTFB time.

260ms for the actual request time is not too shabby and I wouldn’t worry about it.

5

Thanks, I took off all the ads, and my grades are much better now: WebPageTest Test - Running web page performance and optimization tests...

I don’t know if Varnish is acting as a CDN - I don’t think so…

6

Yikes - don’t remove the ads just for the grades. You can see how the visual performance matches up with and without the ads to see what the real impact is but getting all A’s doesn’t really buy you anything in and of itself.

7

I know I need the ads, lol, but it’s interesting to see how the ads affect the grades!

Thanks again for your help!