Reduce server response time

April 25, 2014 12.7k views
ramono
By:
ramono
Hi I've been optimising my website http://ramonlapenta.com to load as fast as possible, but after doing everything I know and testing my website in Google Page Speed and GT Metrix, they both say that I need to reduce server response time: Should Fix: Reduce server response time In our test, your server responded in 1.4 seconds. There are many factors that can slow down your server response time. Please read our recommendations to learn how you can monitor and measure where your server is spending the most time. How can I achieve this?
1 comment
  • nestorpool September 21, 2014

    HI Ramono,

    I was able to test your site now, and I see you don't have the warming of server response time, I have now the same situacion, what have you done to fix this issues?

    Regards.

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6 Answers
jeff638188 April 25, 2014
What application are you running? Appears you have Apache on Ubuntu but how have you setup PHP? What optimizations have you done to the database?

http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140425_9S_12MA/

Shows a pretty slow first response, this suggest something in your application stack from when the server first accepts the request until it is processed and sent.

This could be at any level:
Apache
PHP
MySQL

The non-PHP elements seem to load quickly, so I would start with PHP/MySQL setup.
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ramono April 26, 2014
I'm running Statamic it's a file based CMS, so I don't have a database here.

I have installed MySQL and PhpMyAdmin but I can uninstall them as I'm not using it.

Statamic comes with caching built in and activated by default, so I'm guessing it's come thing related to PHP or Apache, but that's beyond me to know ow to test, or what to look for.

All the other details like compressing images and cache are related to 500px widget which I have no control over.

Thanks for your help.
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fspoettel April 30, 2014
Hey Ramono,

I took a look at the source of Dots and it is most likely the culpris, you should measure your load times without it and see if that helps and then maybe switch to a JS-option for the API. Check out Dug.js for that as it does what you want: https://github.com/rogie/Dug.js/tree/master
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ramono April 30, 2014
Hi fspoettel

I made some tests without the plugins (I'm not using Dots now, but I'm using one for 500px and one for twitter).
In the tests I found that pages with basic content (about/profile, contact) it loads quicker, around 0.7s response time, but in the blog listing page which is not loading any plugins the response time is still around 2.2s.
I'll have a look at your suggestion, but I believe it should still be faster.
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fspoettel May 8, 2014
Hey,
that's strange. I get 200ms response time with a Statamic Blog that pulls in content from 3 folders and does quite a lot of heavy lifting.

Let's troubleshoot some common things:

1.) Are you using transform? If so, please check that the _cache folder or the directory you assigned to Transform is writeable.
2.) Do you have a LOT of entries? Check your _cache-size, it may well be the culprit if it is too large.
3.) Do you use the log-functionality? If so, is there anything showing up in the logs?

Otherwise, shoot a tweet @statamic, these guys are usually of great help and a pleasure to work with.
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mathem December 6, 2017

I have been getting "Reduce server response time" issues with the Pagespeed Insights tool.

To test whether it is due to DNS, PHP, Wordpress or hosting issue, I duplicated my website at Digitalocean and pasted it in Google Cloud - Google Compute Engine instance.

Problem solved! In Google Cloud I'm able to get faster server response times and pass the Pagespeed test with flying colors even with the smallest VPS in gcloud.

So it's not due to PHP or Wordpress. Digitalocean server has server response time issues. The difference was between 300ms and 1s.

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