Where is First Byte TIme coming from?

Hi.

I just ran a test and got an “F” 0/100 for First Byte Time.

http://www.webpagetest.org/result/130212_7C_HWS

Start Offset: 0.19 s
DNS Lookup: 134 ms
Initial Connection: 55 ms
Time to First Byte: 1032 ms
Content Download: 776 ms
Bytes In (downloaded): 56.3 KB
Bytes Out (uploaded): 0.4 KB

I’m trying to figure out what all this means and how to fix it. Is this because of the file size of the html?

Looking for advice.

It isn’t related to the file size, it is about the back-end work that your server has to do to generate the page (database calls usually). Unfortunately we don’t have any visibility into that from the outside other than how long the total time takes.

If you have a developer that can look at it, something like New Relic works really well for telling you where the server is spending it’s time.