Another TTFB thread

[Cameron Worts]

Hi Guys,

I've searched high and low for answers on Google, forums and other sources. A few months ago a client rang me and said that his wordpress site is slow on first load.

So I started to look into it and ran several tests and can see his reason. About two weeks later he rang me again with the same issues so, I asked on the wordpress forums and someone said to install super cache. So I installed the plugin and noticed a slight in decrease in time for his site to load however, it wasn't good enough.

Over the last 2 months we had swapped over to a new network and changed from vmware to KVM and upgraded the software, OS, Ram, cpu cores etc... however, we are experiencing the same TTFB issue. So I temporary increased the resources and this made hardly any difference in the load times. We also changed to SSD hard drives too.

Our monitoring charts are saying that the server resources are more than what we actually need.

We have other non wordpress sites on the system and they are extremely quick to load. So we know that it's not the network, nor the equipment.

Some posts read are saying it's how apache is configured others saying it's the network and/or the equipment but we have tried different things but we are not seeing this issue been resolved.

I'm using cpanel 11.6 + Cloudlinux + Centos 7 with 4 x 2.6Ghz CPU Cores and 10GB ram. We have tried doubling resources with no difference.

 

[Anthony Parsons]

TTFB is a false measurement and you should not use it, to be perfectly honest.

Cloudflare have a really good write-up on this issue where people become consumed: Stop worrying about Time To First Byte (TTFB)

Let your client read it... then they may get that the first load taking longer is due to compression, caching and such, doing their job, thus every subsequent page load is faster due to compression, caching, et cetera, than disabling it to have a great TTFB.

 

[Cameron Worts]

Anthony,

I can see my clients point. I got many types of sites on my server from html and custom designed php websites. On my custom site that is 1.2MB vs. a website that is run by wordpress which is 950KB, the one that is custom programmed loads quicker going by GTMetrix.

Today we installed Litespeed and I'm giving that a go for the next two weeks and seeing a increase in performance but, try telling that to a wanna be SEO guru who thinks he knows better.

 

[Anthony Parsons]

LOL. Send them my way.... been in SEO / SEM for 20+ years. I understand the performance craze going on right now, but TTFB is a nonsense metric compared to second and subsequent load times.

 

[cPanelMichael]

Hello,

There's a semi-related thread here you may find helpful:

Wordpress / Prestashop / x Performance

You can also search for "Wordpress Optimization" on websites such as StackOverflow if you'd like additional user-feedback.

Thanks!

 

[Cameron Worts]

Well loading on litespeed was a great move - websites are a lot faster. Before, even loading wp-admin is a lot quicker. You can't tell me that loading a wordpress dashboard that takes 8 seconds to load is acceptable. Our server is only 5 hops away with 15-35ms.

Michael, I've already tried mysql tuning for nearly 2 weeks and whilst I saw improvement, it was very minor. As soon as I loaded a trial of Litespeed, boom it fixed most of the issues. I had two other linux admins look into it and one of them recommended Litespeed after several hours of investigation.

 

[Anthony Parsons]

Are you using SSD? What caching is being used? Opcache?

Enable php_fpm via whm and that will instantly give you a massive performance boost.

 

[Cameron Worts]

Yep, using php_fpm and using SSD's. Since installing litespeed everything is running really really well - at an extra expense.