Hi all!
A problem that seems to be common regarding the number of threads here: TTFB.
My website is: https://www.akaoma.com
The website is developped under Joomla CMS located on a dedicated server (32G, fast server, etc.). Technically speaking, there no point of weaknesses…
Using WebPageTest (http://www.webpagetest.org/result/150310_8F_187S/) First Byte Time is shown with F letter … that doesn’t sound good for SEO ! 
I’ve done other analysis with bytecheck.com and answer is: Your Time To First Byte is: 0.590 seconds (near around 0.500 upto 1.00)
As I included SSL EV cert some month ago, I’ve checked all website for cert implementation and normally all conf is perfect (ex sslcheck.globalsign.com that gives a A+)
From your opinion, how can I optimize this website???
(using already php opcache zend, apcu cache for pages, jch for html&js optimisation, gzip overall, nginx + apache2, etc…) … I feel disapointed and need better answer for my visitors that are quickly leaving the site due to long response time :-/
Thanks for tips & recommandations guyzs!
Since you’re on a dedicated server (presumably with root access) I HIGHLY recommend your first step to be to install New Relic APM: Application Performance Monitoring | New Relic
The pro level is free for 14 days which should be more than enough time to identify the slow operations and get them fixed (and the free level gives you the same data, just with a 24-hour retention).
If the slow operations are from database or external API calls it will tell you immediately (otherwise it will tell you the php entry points and how long they are taking). A few lines of instrumentation can narrow the php down to specific functions. I have conditional instrumentation at the top of most of WebPageTest’s code to instrument things as I worked on back-end performance: webpagetest/workdone.php at master · WPO-Foundation/webpagetest · GitHub
As best as I can tell, the SSL part of the negotiation is pretty good with the certificates stapled and included but it’s taking ~1.5s for the server itself to respond to the request so something like New Relic is going to be your best bet in figuring it out.
Thanks a lot Patrick for your fast answer & your help.
I’m discovering NewRelic APM and will use as soon as possible to check about the slow operation of my server. I’ll give you soon a feedback about the findings after using this tool if it may also help others!
Thanks again Patrick!
OK I’m coming back with some days of testing NewRelic app that Patrick recommend me.
It’s really impressive, as you can more information than ever: using the External Service tab, I was able to check that some services on one of my test webservers was compromised, as regularly an external request was done to an Indian server (I’m located in Europe).
I was able to optimize all MySQL configuration, with tuning correctly the cache. (using MYSQLTuner for instance).
I detected that some other web mecanisms (as PIWIK) located on same server were making lot of ‘noise’ and sometimes running lot of activity consuming CPU, RAM and threads and lowering global server response time.
I’ll continue to monitor with this tool which is quite complete.
Here is a result of the website throu webpagetest.org :
URL: https://www.akaoma.com/
Host: www.akaoma.com
Error/Status Code: 200
Client Port: 0
Start Offset: 0.304 s
DNS Lookup: 150 ms
Initial Connection: 31 ms
SSL Negotiation: 122 ms
Time to First Byte: 1080 ms
Content Download: 1 ms
Bytes In (downloaded): 73.3 KB
Bytes Out (uploaded): 0.2 KB
Even if FTB is always is ‘F’ notation, it sounds not the major preoccupation as the website results are:
Document Complete Fully Loaded
Load Time First Byte Start Render Visually Complete Speed Index DOM Elements Result (error code) Time Requests Bytes In Time Requests Bytes In
2.838s 1.384s 2.107s 8.700s 3453 1289 0 2.838s 61 562 KB 8.769s 94 1,601 KB
Which sounds good in my opinion.
Any comment on the results?