Why is there a gap in the waterfall?

Web Performance Discuss Test Results
1

I tested out a site that I’m working to optimize and there’s a gap in the waterfall that seems to make the site load take longer. Any ideas what could cause a lapse in the page load time?

Also, why is there SSL negotiation? The site doesn’t use SSL. Is it from that one item: ssl.livezilla.net? It looks like that could be causing some issues as well.

Any tips you can give would be greatly appreciated. I’m really looking to get this site’s speed as low as I can. :smiley:

test results:
http://www.webpagetest.org/result/120928_8Z_CS3/

2

Any ideas? I’d really appreciate any pointers for getting a nice clean load. This site uses Joomla if that helps anyone.

3

Thought I’d look at your site to see if I could spot any problems, but -

403: Access Forbidden
Your country (GB) has been blacklisted

4

If you go into the advanced settings you can enable a dev tools timeline capture for Chrome which will give you more visibility into the gap.

That said, the gap isn’t your biggest problem:

  • You need to enable keep-alives on your server, that is REALLY killing your performance.
  • You also need to go through your images and change all of the photos from png’s to jpeg’s - they will get a LOT smaller.
  • Finally, you can merge a lot of the smaller png’s together into image sprites which will eliminate a bunch of requests
5

Yeah, definitively go through an merge existing graphics into only one, and also see if some of the cosmetic effects you are applying through graphics can be done with CSS. Your goal should be to try and reduce the total number of requests from your current 74 to be under 20