Start Render Time

[pmeenan]

Be a little careful not to over optimize for the webpagetest testers as you might impact real users negatively (particularly when adding sleeps). AFAIK, IE basically refreshes the UI when it gets some idle time and if it is busy laying out the page or queuing thing up it gets pushed back. That would be my most likely guess as to why the render gets delayed in the streamlined case - the resources are coming down frequently enough to prevent it from refreshing the screen.

[jarrod1937]

(06-21-2010 02:47 AM)pmeenan Wrote:  AFAIK, IE basically refreshes the UI when it gets some idle time and if it is busy laying out the page or queuing thing up it gets pushed back.

Well, does webpagetest accurately behave like a general user IE install? Because even if the above is the case, if the delay does give it a chance to output to the screen earlier, then to me that behavior is welcomed even at the minor expense of a 20 ms delay for the total load time. To me a 20 ms delay for load time vs. 500 ms increase in start render is a good tradeoff.
But you're correct, i wouldn't add any more delay than that, i actually originally started with a 200 ms delay and worked my way back to find the minimum delay needed to achieve the same results.

[pmeenan]

Yes, WebPagetest runs just like a normal user but a "single" normal user with a very specific hardware and network configuration. At a minimum, test it from the different locations and at different bandwidth settings to make sure it is consistent and not just specific to the hardware running at the Dulles location.

[jarrod1937]

(06-23-2010 01:10 AM)pmeenan Wrote:  At a minimum, test it from the different locations and at different bandwidth settings to make sure it is consistent and not just specific to the hardware running at the Dulles location.

Yes, i've been wanting to do that for a while, but isn't Dulles still the only test location that supports the setDns scripting? I did test it at the Dulles location at different speeds and got the same start render time improvements.

[pmeenan]

All of the locations besides San Jose and China SHOULD have the SetDNS scripting code now. I hope to get those last two updated when I get back from Velocity.

[DJMorrisInc]

(06-23-2010 03:56 AM)pmeenan Wrote:  All of the locations besides San Jose and China SHOULD have the SetDNS scripting code now. I hope to get those last two updated when I get back from Velocity.

I tried MaxCDN and w3-total-cache but it interfered with my Thesis wordpress theme and the site would not load correctly, so I went back to my hyper cache and cron-job for resetting the cache once a day.

I would love to get my start render time down, but what is the most beneficial way to do so and is it possible to improve the other areas when a lot of my site is from a 3rd party that displays real estate property pages individually that get indexed by Google on my site.

My latest test results... http://www.webpagetest.org/result/100624_G00/

Any suggestions for improvement will be greatly appreciated .

[jarrod1937]

(06-25-2010 06:38 AM)DJMorrisInc Wrote:  

(06-23-2010 03:56 AM)pmeenan Wrote:  All of the locations besides San Jose and China SHOULD have the SetDNS scripting code now. I hope to get those last two updated when I get back from Velocity.

I tried MaxCDN and w3-total-cache but it interfered with my Thesis wordpress theme and the site would not load correctly, so I went back to my hyper cache and cron-job for resetting the cache once a day.

I would love to get my start render time down, but what is the most beneficial way to do so and is it possible to improve the other areas when a lot of my site is from a 3rd party that displays real estate property pages individually that get indexed by Google on my site.

My latest test results...

Any suggestions for improvement will be greatly appreciated .

Not sure if you meant to post your reply in this topic. But what problems did you have with maxcdn and wordpress? I've successfully used it on our wordpress install just fine.

[DJMorrisInc]

(06-25-2010 06:49 AM)jarrod1937 Wrote:  Not sure if you meant to post your reply in this topic. But what problems did you have with maxcdn and wordpress? I've successfully used it on our wordpress install just fine.

Sorry for going a little off topic about my CDN issue, but I just wasn't sure if that would of helped my start render time, but I just wanted to throw in that I already tried that one. I am sure MaxCDN is great, but the one thing that has really helped my site was the cron job I set up with hyper cache so I really wasn't all that keen to deactivate that and go to w3-total-cache.....for some reason minify plugin makes all my scores go down too, so I am not sure why I get so much conflict with things like MaxCDN and the minify plugin....my pages and Thesis theme doesn't display correctly with them?

[jarrod1937]

Oh ok, sorry i just thought you had accidentally posted the reply in this topic but meant to post it in another (happens in forums a lot more than you'd think), so just ignore my above reply.
As for your issue, it may be true that those things together didn't make your page work, but that is why you should try one optimization at a time. For example, your caching method is a completely separate topic from maxcdn. So i am not sure if maxcdn was the cause of your issues and i'd recommend giving it another try, it seriously helped lower my page load times. You should use it for any images you may have and if possible using it for your themes css file (using two different pull zones for better parallelization).

[pmeenan]

Fundamentally you need to get those css and js files combined into one of each to get your start render times. W3 is one solution that will do it for you and there may be others but that's really the only optimization you should be looking at initially. You can try looking for another plugin that does the combining but still plays nice with hypercache - maybe PHPSpeedy: http://aciddrop.com/2008/12/15/php-speed...d-upgrade/