I’m having a rough time with First Byte.
http://www.webpagetest.org/result/131107_TF_1X9/
Any help?
This is probably caused by your CMS, TomatoCart. It means it takes your web server a while to put together all the elements that go into creating the page before it gets sent to the browser (database, templates, etc.). If you’re no shared hosting, there’s not a whole lot you can do about this. Have you looked into the built-in caching features? See: http://www.tomatocart.com/support/administration-tool/16-tools/70-cache-control.html
Compared to a test I ran on the TomatoCart demo site, yours is actually pretty good: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/131107_D6_16JA/
I wouldn’t worry about it too much. Most webshops suffer from a poor TTFB.
Thnaks for the response. I don’t know that I’ve seen another tomatocart result get any better. I should look into that.
I use the Rackspace Cloud Server system,
CentOS 6.4 2gig of Ram 80 gig harddrive,
Next Generation Server
Linux 2.6.32-358.18.1.el6.x86_64
Apache/2.2.15 (CentOS)
MySQL 5.1.69
PHP: 5.3.3 / Zend: 2.3.0
I was under the impression this was before any of the database and object requests… I thought this was at the end of the handshake.
I ran a test on just a simple webpage with the text helloworld and got this.
http://www.webpagetest.org/result/131108_NM_79W/
So I guess you’re right. The cache you pointed out is always on. Built it…
Have you installed an opcode cache for PHP, such as APC? yum list php-pecl-apc
Pulling information from the database, parsing templates and such, these are usually limited by CPU and disk speed.
The handshake ends when the green “connection” bar ends. From that point on, the browser has to wait for the server to construct the page that it will ultimately send back to the client. When lots of template parsing, database calls and other calculations have to take place, this can add up, even when you’re on a cloud server like yours. It’s often a result of “bloatware” or poor programming.
Again, I wouldn’t worry about it too much, since your TTFB is still below 1s. I often see webshops with 1-2s TTFBs (often Magento).
I don’t know what that cache for PHP is but I’ll look into it and see if I have it.
thanks for the help.
Alright… got that installed. Also installed the pagespeed module from Google.
http://www.webpagetest.org/result/131109_JQ_9TQ/
still crappy firstbyte… but everything else is doing well. Google ads are slowing me down now.
still have my css render blocking.
thanks for the help.
Yes, Adsense performance is rather poor, but probably about as good as it can get. Have you tried the new asynchronous ad code?
I have seen it, but had not implemented it… Now I have. Thanks for the tip. Now to go see if it helped… 
You can try serving your favicon outside of your CMS.