You are fine with the package but if you get more traffic in your website definitely you will need a bigger DO package. Here the website loads in a second, try clearing your browser history, cache etc.

Hi Marinos,

I am actually benchmarking using pingdom's tools. They ping my server every minute, so my average values are over a few days and there is definitely an increase in time.

Do you have any tips for how I could reduce the response time without going for a bigger DO package?

Give something like this a try (customizing to suit your setup)

server {
listen 80;
listen 443 ssl spdy;
server_name example.com;
root /path/to/files;
index index.html index.htm index.php;

location / {
try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args;
expires max;
}

if ($https != "on") {
return 301 https://$host$uri;
}

ssl on;
spdy_headers_comp 9;
ssl_stapling on;
resolver 8.8.8.8
8.8.4.4 valid=3600s;
resolver_timeout 4s;
ssl_stapling_verify on;
ssl_session_timeout 5m;
ssl_prefer_server_ciphers on;
ssl_session_cache shared:SSL:60m;
ssl_protocols SSLv3 TLSv1 TLSv1.1 TLSv1.2;
add_header Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=31536000";
ssl_ciphers ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-SHA384:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA384:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256:ECDHE-ECDSA-RC4-SHA:ECDHE-RSA-RC4-SHA:ECDH-ECDSA-RC4-SHA:ECDH-RSA-RC4-SHA:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA:RC4-SHA;

ssl_certificate /path/to/certificate.crt;
ssl_trusted_certificate /path/to/ca.crt;
ssl_certificate_key /path/to/key.key;
}

I think Aidhan is pointing you in the right direction. Using spdy is probably your best bet.

Hi Aidhan,

Do you mind going through what about that config is customised to suit my setup?

Currently I can see two immediate problems: the default build of nginx on ubuntu 12.04 doesn't support spdy or ssl_stapling.

@rb: sudo apt-get install nginx-extras