How to speed up TTFB (django+gunicorn+nginx)

I’m trying to migrate an existing Django web app from AWS (using Apache) to DigitalOcean using nginx.

It’s not an identical comparison, but I’m getting massive differences in TTFB which I can’t account for. For a basic page, I’m getting these stats:

Discovered: 0.010 s Request Start: 0.258 s DNS Lookup: 26 ms Initial Connection: 97 ms SSL Negotiation: 118 ms Time to First Byte: 7159 ms Content Download: 2 ms Bytes In (downloaded): 4.9 KB Uncompressed Size: 31.1 KB Bytes Out (uploaded): 0.5 KB

In comparison to my AWS site which is

Discovered: 0.008 s Request Start: 0.124 s DNS Lookup: 27 ms Initial Connection: 31 ms SSL Negotiation: 50 ms Time to First Byte: 579 ms Content Download: 3 ms Bytes In (downloaded): 6.2 KB Uncompressed Size: 34.2 KB Bytes Out (uploaded): 0.5 KB

I’ve followed the tutorials for:

• initial server setup
• setting up Nginx and Django
• doing SSL certificates

When that resulted in really slow TTFB I proceeded to

• Enable gzip compression
• Ensure HTTP/2 was used.
• Tried other nginx optimisation tricks

In an attempt to see some of the numbers budge, I moved a lot of asset loading to CDN. It ticked a lot of boxes in https://www.webpagetest.org, but it didn’t alter the TTFB, which is by far the biggest bottleneck.

As you can see a 7s TTFB is absolutely massive! Most users keep mentioning times in the >1s range.

I’m totally stumped for ideas now, so short of nuking my droplet and starting from scratch, I’m not sure what else to try.

Is there something I should double check? I can post some configs if that helps.