Hi, I’ve been tuning my site for the past week and managed to speed it up quite a bit. Your tool has been really helpful in testing the changes so thanks for that! Here’s my recent test result: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/121208_HZ_96D/.
One thing that I can’t wrap my head around is how the Repeat View is constantly slower than the First View? I thought with all the caching in place that this would be practically impossible to achieve. Mind you the fully loaded time is usually a bit faster but not where I’d expect it to be.
Other than reducing the First Byte Time I’m fairly happy with the results. Do you have suggestions on how to improve this time? Beyond that, is there anything further I could do?
FYI I’m running the website on Drupal 7 with Linode 1024 hosting.
The variability in your first byte times is what made the repeat view slower than the first view. It’s not normal in a well performing site but it’s not unusual to see if the server or database are shared or when other configuration tuning is needed.
I still don’t know what to do to improve the Repeat View performance though. I have other websites on the same VPS but the results are always the same no matter what time of the day it’s run. Any pointers on where to investigate further?
You can try testing with Chrome and checking the option to record a dev tools timeline trace in the advanced settings. You can download the timeline and see what the browser is doing for the bulk of that time (the CPU is spiked pretty hard but that could be reading from cache, layout or javascript execution).