Question
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:
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.
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@404namenotfound My guess was that TFFB was heavily affected by using an Amazon hosted database but having everything else hosted at DigitalOcean. I wasn’t prepared to migrate the database to DigitalOcean at the time so I had a mix of the app/sever running on DigitalOcean but the database was on AWS. Because of time constraints, I gave up and basically cloned my exact DigitalOcean ubuntu OS configuration to an AWS EC2 nano instance and everything came right. Perhaps if I went all-in on DigitalOcean I could have avoided a high TTFB too.
My video is based on a compilation of the most important DO tutorials, including security and configuration. It is possible that my Nginx configuration is better prepared for a real case. Or it may, that a small syntax error is causing this slowness. I guess you’ve replaced HTML5 + PHP with HTML5 + Python. You should observe the browser’s command console (F12) and that there is no error. Have you contacted DO support?
Maybe my video tutorial can help you (English subtitles): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNw7EyXtT_k&t=686s
and this tutorial with Ubuntu 18.04: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-django-with-postgres-nginx-and-gunicorn-on-ubuntu-18-04