First Byte Time - too long

[grahamginsberg]

I've tried everything I know how to reduce this number.

The hosting company doesn't know how to adjust the server and I can't figure if its my site or the server to begin with.

Any ideas are appreciated
http://www.webpagetest.org/result/110906_N7_1H3DP/

[pmeenan]

The web server itself doesn't seem to be having any fundamental performance issues - the requests for the static resources all come back in roughly the same amount of time as the connect time. If I had to guess, I would say that the time is coming from the back-end database queries supporting Word Press.

I looked at the page source and didn't see any obvious signs of a page cache being used (W3 Total Cache, Super Cache, etc). If you don't have one installed then that would be your fastest path to improving it.

Is it a VPS or a shared server? If it is a VPS you have a few more knobs you can tweak, particularly around installing and using APC (and configuring W3TC to use it for it's cache).

[grahamginsberg]

It's shared, but only a few clients on it and mine is probably the biggest site.
What is APC again?
W3 Cache for some reason never helps performance on the site. I've tried every cache program known several times over.

Here is an awesome site and I wish I knew how he did it.
buysarasota.com/

[pmeenan]

APC is a memory cache for PHP itself that caches the compiled version of the php code. It also exposes interfaces to php so that you can cache arbitrary data in it. It doesn't usually play very nice with shared hosting without jumping through a fair number of hoops though.

buysarasota.com doesn't look like it was built with Word Press (or Joomla). It could be a completely custom job or possibly Drupal.

[grahamginsberg]

Patrick
I just tried querry caching and it made no difference. Thanks for the jpg compressor.
Is there a good gif or png compressor?

[tsoudaz]

avoid gif except for animated ones.

for png compression Optipng is great.