Terrible TTFB Times

[pmeenan]

TTFB is not influenced with anything that is pulled in by the browser (like the social buttons). By external web service, I meant one that is called directly by your web server (some spam prevention plugins may do this if they need to check with a central database).

I'm not sure which of Rack Space's plans are covered but I know New Relic has a deal with them where you get some of their services for free (more than the typical free account) - http://newrelic.com/rackspace

Was the W3TC total query time of 0.155 seconds on a fast or a slow load? You can have WebPagetest record the response bodies (checkbox in the advanced settings) so you can get a correlated debug trace and test results.