Time to First Byte = "F"

Web Performance Discuss Test Results
1

I’ve been testing page load times for a few of the following URLs:

http://www.financialliteracytools.net/tooldev002/literacy/vehicle/v02
http://www.financialliteracytools.net/tooldev002/literacy/mortgage/m04
http://www.financialliteracytools.net/tooldev002/literacy/savings/s02
http://www.financialliteracytools.net/tooldev002/literacy/debt/d02

And I’m consistently getting long (> 2sec) Time to First Byte times. I’d appreciate insight forum members can offer on what may be the cause of this.

A link to my /vehicle/v02 test:

http://www.webpagetest.org/result/120704_RF_QZ8/1/details/

As background:

I’m running on Drupal 7. For this site, I’ve already enabled the Alternative APC Cache and Boost modules. My performance settings have all cache options enabled, with compression for CSS. The only option not selected is compressed JS, but I don’t think that is a ‘first byte’ issue.

I’ve run ySlow tests on these pages and have made some corrections and I’m getting a grade of “B”. It looks like I have some work to do with using cookie free domains to serve some content and I’ll look into that.

These are VERY static web pages and so I’d like to make sure that I’m caching everything I can to boost page load speeds.

2

Might be worth it to try the Boost plugin in case Drupal’s built-in page caching isn’t kicking in for some reason - http://drupal.org/node/1434362

Looking at the requests for static content it looks like the hosting provider can serve static files better than your current base page but even those look to be a lot more variable and take longer than you would expect (green bars should be as close in length to the orange bars).

FWIW, also looks like gzipping was broken when the test was run. You’ll save quite a bit of front-end time by getting it working (particularly the calcjs.js download).

3

The problem is the application, it takes too long time, maybe the server is too busy, o the application is not optimized.

In the test you have 1.437s TTFB, for grade “A”, you must have <.5 seg.
In a new test you have 0.553s is not too good, the grade was “D”, you need to optimize a little more to have a grade “A”.

If you compress css o js, you are not going to have better TTFB, this optimization is for content download.
For static content you must have <100 ms TTFB as a good time.