Yet another time to first byte question

[headfonia]

Thanks Leptien,
I have set the gzip compression on for html & xml, css & js, and media and other files through W3TC, but apparently they still don't gzip the basepage. Then how can I gzip the basepage?

By the way I have page cache turned on for everything except the basepage, as I need the banner ads to rotate and I can't do that if the page cache is turned on.

Also another weird thing that I notice is that I've set W3TC to load from CDN small graphic files that is used by the theme (such as search icon, loading graphic, arrows, etc) but the test reveals that those graphic files are still fetch from my server. These are one of the files I am talking about:

http://www.webpagetest.org/result/110913...#request48

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Patrick, here is what my hosting support staff said about the slow time to first byte:


The delay looks to be coming up due to the number of DB queries that the
main page is making to load. In my test this morning, a single request to
http://www.headfonia.com/ needed 128 queries on the DB before it loaded.
You may want to check to see if any of that content could be cached, or
otherwise if there are any plug-ins or features for WP that are requiring
heavy DB interaction that could be removed or perhaps just moved to
sub-pages off of the main index page. Otherwise, the server load, RAM usage
and disk I/O all appear to be fine. The site isn't hitting hardware
bottlenecks.

I don't understand why this is since database cache is supposedly on with W3TC.