http://www.webpagetest.org/result/110204_8S_6281e6c216e12efd0e751314c53f994e/
how do i improve this result?
I’d recommend improving the page first and then the result can be looked at. Even in a single request a little css styling and color would be nice.
That said, if you’re serious about improving the performance of THAT page you can get a static IP, set the DNS TTL a lot higher (currently set at 1 minute) and use a dedicated DNS provider with a distributed anycast infrastructure.
You should also run a bunch of tests to make sure you don’t get variability introduced by Dreamhost’s servers. If the html is pretty static you can use a CDN and serve it directly from the edge.
-Pat
That html only page? Maybe shorten the names of your folders so your htm-file becomes a bit smaller? 
Wooft! More of a shallow pond than a waterfall.
You might save a few milliseconds by reducing the size of your HTML. Chang your doctype to . Very HTML5. You don’t need quote marks for attributes so there’s a couple of bytes.
Thanks for the points.
fyi, i want to optimize that SITE, not THAT page - but want to do so systematically.
an empty page with 1 request seems a logical place to start.
regardless, added some color to the page…
http://www.webpagetest.org/result/110205_16_ad78bb71111b336f0f5d4c5cc43b9048/1/details/#request1
assuming the page is served by maxcdn, is the static ip address beneficial?
is the dedicated DNS provider necessary if the page is served by a cdn?
where it is showing ttl of 60? ping shows about 40s, dig says the 1074s for the A record and 14400 for the NS records.
re: reducing the size of the html by a few bytes
file size was 1.7KB, which downloaded in 0 ms.
is there a prefered dns provider? i found this, but don’t know if it’s better or worse than other companies out there which offer the same service:
http://www.loaddns.com/solutions/manageddnsbasic.aspx
I don’t have a lot of experience with various DNS providers, just look for one that uses an Anycast network and has servers close to your customers (DYN and Ultra are the bigger players that I’m aware of, I’m using DNS Made Easy but mostly because they’re cheap ).
If your base HTML pages are also going to be served by a CDN then you don’t have to worry about a DNS provider, just make sure the CDN provider you select has a good DNS architecture as well (scary as it is, the largest CDN provider doesn’t use Anycast for their DNS so resolution performance can vary quite wildly).
A static IP could still help, even when using something like maxcdn (I believe they offer it as an option either through maxcdn or their netdna offerings) because it will eliminate one of the steps in the lookup (CNAME->A record).
That said, this is all on the REALLY extreme side of optimizing. If the site is going to be more than just static files with each page being a single request then there’s going to be a lot more low-hanging-fruit than optimizing the DNS architecture - the DNS will only buy you a few ms on a single request (more if the existing DNS is not great and uncached like it was in the test you ran).
Here is the record I get using nslookup (d2 debug level):
Got answer (93 bytes):
HEADER:
opcode = QUERY, id = 25, rcode = NOERROR
header flags: response, want recursion, recursion avail.
questions = 1, answers = 0, authority records = 1, additional = 0
QUESTIONS:
www.jesseo.com, type = AAAA, class = IN
AUTHORITY RECORDS:
-> jesseo.com
type = SOA, class = IN, dlen = 49
ttl = 60 (1 min)
primary name server = ns1.dreamhost.com
responsible mail addr = hostmaster.dreamhost.com
serial = 2011020200
refresh = 16206 (4 hours 30 mins 6 secs)
retry = 1800 (30 mins)
expire = 1814400 (21 days)
default TTL = 14400 (4 hours)
ok - have set up dnsmadeeasy. thanks!
btw, i ran some tests and it seemed like the domain dnsmadeeasy.com was consistently about 0.2 seconds faster than the actual domain i’m optimizing. 55-85ms vs 220-370ms.
seems significant - as this is an absolute bottleneck.
DNS lookups for the dnsmadeeasy domain? Looked like the dns lookups for your domain in the test you linked were ~56ms.
Thanks,
-Pat