WebPageTest

Just wanted to update you all:
http://www.webpagetest.org/result/111204_EH_2CTZ6/
http://www.webpagetest.org/result/111204_7X_2CTZ7/

First byte time decreased big time by only switching to litespeed!

Cool. Sounds like at least a good chunk of the time was just poor scaling of the Apache. It's really hard (at least for us mortals) to scale Apache well for PHP.

I expect the remaining 400ms that New Relic was showing is largely unchanged (unless it's measurement includes the server wait time but I didn't think it did).

Just a question regarding Marvin, how did he get to detect dns?
Did he just upload images/js/css files to his CDN?
That's why it's detecting it?

IceWoLF, the test does recognize your CDN, but most of your files are being served from your origin server. I only see very few of your files going via your CDN (rss.png, twitter.png, facebook.png).

In vBulletin, you can use the "Add New Replacement Variable" feature to change the following:

http:// www.47r-squad .com/images/

to, for example, the following:

http:// edge.47r-squad .com/images/

There are a few good step-by-step tutorials for this, and you may find them by searching for "vbulletin cdn replacement variable".

Here's the first one I found (but there are others, too). Read mainly the step #5: http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/vbulletin-...ation.html

Marvin & pmeenan, thank you for your help!

http://www.webpagetest.org/result/111220_DC_2KBHK/
http://www.webpagetest.org/result/111220_3M_2KBJJ/

First byte times are grade A!

Great. Any one thing that helped most or did you have to grind away at a few?

Well EdgeCast CDN is very good compared to MaxCDN.
I didn't have enough time to do the deep integration yet, but once I get around it should be even faster.
Some of my Canadian users in the east are having a better luck connecting to my website.
EdgeCast CDN is costing me $10 a month, where I can simply pay $40 a year for MaxCDN.

Also switching vbulletin datastore to InnoDB helped too.
My host was telling me I was some locking up issues with my database involving datastore.
Some weird stuff, but I guess it's working

I heard Cloudflare will help improve site load time?

I also tried one here: http://loofamily.info