WebPagetest Forums

Hi,

We have done all sorts of modifications, however, the TFFB for seems to be about 3-3.5 seconds out of a page load time of 7 seconds.

Refer the bottom of attached screenshot. The long grey bar(HTML) takes 2.5-3 seconds to process - while every other resource is under 200ms. This grey bar has been consistently very longer than the rest of the page since forever now.

I have no clue what could be causing this to happen, since:

1. It's a SSD VPS.
2. Resource utilisation is under 10% for the server.(CPU, RAM and disk)
3. Caches(server and client side) are properly implemented.
4. The test location is barely 300 miles from the server datacenter.

Any help would be appreciated.

Which CMS are you running? That looks to be all backend processing time for your application i.e the time it takes for your server to compile the html output from the database, php files etc.

There doesn't look to be any server caching enabled on that test. Do you have a link to the test?

Its an eCommerce site. CMS is opencart based on PHP, MYSQL.

Test result from today(more or less the same result as earlier): https://www.webpagetest.org/result/17070...59458ddc8/

1. It's a SSD VPS.
So what? The whole idea of getting performance out of a VPS is to minimise disk access. All this does is speed up startup time ( Obviously an oversimplification! )

2. Resource utilisation is under 10% for the server.(CPU, RAM and disk)
Good!

3. Caches(server and client side) are properly implemented.
That's a bit questionable... server side caches are how you speed stuff up.

4. The test location is barely 300 miles from the server datacenter.
Good for latency.

This long TTFB time is indicating that the server needs reconfiguring. As you say there are plenty of spare resources, then it's up to you to utilise them to improve things... sitting around not using them is no use to anyone! So look at the performance of MySQL and PHP and what can be done to improve things.

Your DNS provider also seems to be adding to delays - with the test client taking the best part of a second to get an answer. Maybe look at an alternate provider? ( Also, if you're accessing remote services in building your web page, do you have a local DNS server installed ).

As delivery of static resource requires 'zero' server side processing, it's unsurprising that it's much shorter.

There are other things that could be done, but it's the law of diminishing returns...
The ot