Site Slowed Down, Long Time to First Byte

[jgarb544]

We recently moved our website http://www.mspinc.com to a new server and it seems slower. Could a busy server (multiple sites hosted on it) cause long time to first byte?

[pmeenan]

Yes, but there are a lot of other tuning parameters that could also cause it (Database, APC cache, Apache configuration).

[jgarb544]

Do you think the Time to First Byte is slow?

[pmeenan]

Yep. Excruciatingly. It should be well under 1 second.

[jgarb544]

Good to know. Thanks.

[jgarb544]

(07-27-2011 04:49 AM)pmeenan Wrote:  Yep. Excruciatingly. It should be well under 1 second.

When you say it should be under 1 second, so you mean per file or total?

[pmeenan]

Sorry, I mean for the base page itself - the first byte time from when the test started until the base page started to come back (which is the measured first byte time for the test) - this is including the DNS lookup and socket connect.

For individual requests for the static content the first byte times should be substantially lower than that and should basically just be the round trip time (usually under 100ms).

[jgarb544]

What do you think about the time to first byte for this internal page?

[pmeenan]

That's not bad. What you want to do is compare the orange bar to the green bar. If they are exactly the same size then that's as fast as you could EVER be. Having a green bar around twice the size of the orange bar is on the better end of what I usually see.

[pmeenan]

And hence the "A" for first byte time :-)