Slow website; what's your take on this?

[JMTC]

(04-27-2014 03:25 AM)Anton Chigurh Wrote:  Even though it's just a savings of 3kb, I would still grab the third image shown here, rename it to match what's in the file system, and upload to overwrite.

Thanks, done so.

(04-27-2014 03:25 AM)Anton Chigurh Wrote:  You're looking pretty darn good on the only test parameter I use, Dulles VA on fast cable connection, IE 10. Here's that result from just now.

That's true, results from LA today are also good: test result.

(04-29-2014 04:17 AM)pmeenan Wrote:  Don't focus too much on the results from a single test - run a bunch of them and see if the slow DNS is common or if you just happened to catch an outlier. A single dropped packet can add 2 seconds to DNS for example. Generally CloudFlare is usually good about DNS performance but their DNS servers also get DOS attacked a lot (usually with no visible impact since they deal with it regularly) but if you catch a test right when a particularly large attack is going on you may also see some impact.

If you're not already, you can follow their system status twitter account which notifies about any known issues: https://twitter.com/CloudFlareSys

Thanks, that's true. My webpagetest results seem to have improved from that location, so probably just a fluke (for example, Moscow here from today).


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(04-27-2014 03:25 AM)Anton Chigurh Wrote:  You can also turn CF off and test your site - this can be educational in showing you CF really doesn't do, jack for you.

As an update, I upgraded previous weekend to CloudFlare Pro, not only since this would get better performance but also for the security. So far I have the impression that my first byte times have dropped, perhaps due that paying customers get a priority in a data centre over free customers.

Besides that, I also changed the following:
* Changed cache expire headers from htaccess for HTML to multiple weeks so that more content is served from a CF data centre;
* Enabled SPDY,
* Enabled mirage 2 and image optimization from CF. This has dropped my grade due to how mirage works.

If I look at Pingdom's RUM data, performance last week was much, much poorer:
- Average page load time 3.9s (501 pageviews),
- Average page load has increased for various countries compared to the weeks before: US (154 pageviews, now 4.0s), Australia (17 pageviews, now 35.0s!), UK (16 pageviews, now 3.9s).
- Only a few countries with more than 10 pageviews have an average page load below 2 seconds this week: Hong Kong (0.78s), Germany (1.1s), Russia (0.93s), Italy (1.1s), Netherlands (0.40s), Ukraine (1.2s).

I don't understand this: why would page views from Ukraine almost be four times as quick than from the US, given that the latter quite probably has superior internet infrastructure?

Furthermore, if I look at the average page load times as collected by Pingdom RUM, performance has deteriorated recently (I did not change the site layout; graph shows data from the last month. ):

Edit: Do you guys know how reliable Pingdom's RUM data is? I've tried to replicate the poor results from Australia, but I still get a load time less than 3 seconds (test result), which is nowhere near the poor results Pingdom suggest.