First byte time on first run

[datadiggers]

(11-18-2017 07:15 PM)Cloudmaster Wrote:  Things seem to be going well!!

I'd like to think that MySQL tuning has had the biggest difference, but another change I made was to point Wordpress to 127.0.0.1 for the database rather than localhost. I think that's made the biggest difference.

http://www.webpagetest.org/result/171118...a324a94cf/

Changing 127.0.0.1 to localhost has so tiny difference in your case that you really shouldn't even think about it unless your WP executes dozens of thousands of SQL queries.

Most probably you have caching plugin installed (W3TC or something similar) or your web server is caching your pages on per URL basis. On first visit you hit empty cache and PHP code has to be run on your server which results in 1.0+ sec response times. On subsequent requests the cache for this URL is already populated and it's a basically matter of sending back static content to the user browser.

You can easily verify that. Check response times for:
http://randomthoughts.trisect.uk/?t=3
(alter the "3" at the end). You will notice that the first request takes 1.0sec+ time to complete and next requests to that URL require substantially less time to complete. Then change the URL parameter again to notice that the first request again requires 1.0sec+.