Start Render Time

[jarrod1937]

http://www.webpagetest.org/result/100619...1/details/

With the use of maxcdn, the extra domains/subdomains and properly maxing out the connections between them i was able to get the start render time to 1.287 seconds and the page load time of 1.980 seconds. Thats a pretty good number considering the page i've been testing is our site's average worst case, where they load up a category with at least 50 products showing.
As for progressive render, if you look at the waterfall i think the php flushing is actually working. The main html doc hadn't completely loaded, yet the .css file was requested from the cdn. To me this is good enough and a reason not to implement server-level chunking as I personally prefer the granularity of flushing output to the user in the application. This way i can try to flush the output at more optimal times than the server might.
On a random note, is there a way to speed up the initial connections? Or is it mostly just network delay that i can't help?