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I spent a long time optimizing my site at http://bit.ly/eLl4uT Outside of factors that I can do nothing about (offsite chat), I think I did pretty good. However after...
Implementing New dedicated - 2x Dual Core Opteron, 16GB RAM, 2x 73GB SCSI 10k RPM, Hardware RAID1.
Implementing MaxCDN using custom URLs from a different domain (to maximize connections, when needed, without cookies).

My pages are much faster, the rub?

Time spent downloading a page (in milliseconds)


What is causing the increase? It corresponds exactly to all the above measures I took. Is it the new server? Is it MaxCDN implementation? How on earth do I tell?

The time Google spends downloading a page is usually for the stuff NOT coming from the CDN (usually your app and html). Did all of your server-level optimizations make it across (gzipping, APC cache - assuming php, web server tuning)?

FWIW, here is what mine looked like when I upgraded my server:

[attachment=125]

(the big drop towards the beginning of July)

I moved from an Atom to Xeon CPU, 4GB to 32GB Ram, put in a RAID0 SSD array and switched from Apache to Nginx. The bulk of my gain came from the switch to Nginx (was using apache with mod_php and the prefork mpm which doesn't deal well with persistent connections). The original server was also running an SSD for the main content so while the new one is much faster, the old was pretty zippy as well.

According to New Relic, my server response times average 6ms right now :-D (and the server handled a crazy slashdotting/Google launch today without degrading).

Using mod-deflate
I'm caching php html output within the app and using eAccelerator
query caching is also enabled both in the app and mySql

If anything html output has gotten smaller not larger. Given what you say, it has to be a server issue or bad move to adjacent data center.