Magento1.8 – Fix 30 Second First Time to Byte (FTTB) Load Time

magento-1.8

This has been extremely frustrating for us, our website is taking 40 seconds to load, and first time to byte is showing as 32 seconds on a Magento site. We are not sure what is causing this – back end seems to load OK, but frontend is taking forever. I am suspecting that is is a script issue.

http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140712_M8_GMP/

Can someone please help. How do we go debugging this? We have implemented that we can to improve the performance (like the tips about cleaning logs, compressing the javascript and CSS – did all that but undo it to show the scripts we are running) but 32 seconds seems like there's a major issue? How can we know if it's a server issue, or there's a conflict with the scripts we installed. Please help!

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Best Answer

If you're having 30 second "FTTB" then it's not a javascript problem. The web browser needs to download javascript files, same as any other. "FTTB" happens earlier in the process.

First, test how long it takes apache to response to a redirect request. This will let you know if there's a non Magento/PHP problem

$ date;curl http://acgears.com/media;date
Sat Jul 12 15:03:15 PDT 2014
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
<html><head>
<title>301 Moved Permanently</title>
</head><body>
<h1>Moved Permanently</h1>
<p>The document has moved <a href="http://acgears.com/media/">here</a>.</p>
<hr>
<address>Apache/2.2.24 (Unix) mod_hive/3.6 mod_ssl/2.2.24 OpenSSL/1.0.0-fips mod_auth_passthrough/2.1 mod_bwlimited/1.4 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635 mod_fcgid/2.3.6 Server at acgears.com Port 80</address>
</body></html>
Sat Jul 12 15:03:16 PDT 2014

Above we've requested the URL http://acgears.com/media. Apache should always redirect this to http://acgears.com/media/. We've wrapped the curl call in a call to the date command. This will give us rough timing. As you can see, this is taking less than a second, so that's not your problem.

Next, request a static file you know exists. This is another check to make sure the web server is running normally.

$ date;curl 'http://acgears.com/js/prototype/prototype.js';date;
Sat Jul 12 15:06:30 PDT 2014
/*  Prototype JavaScript framework, version 1.7
 *  (c) 2005-2010 Sam Stephenson
[...]

Sat Jul 12 15:06:30 PDT 2014

Again, timing here seems normal. Finally, request the homepage and see how long a Magento bootstrapped request takes.

$ date;curl 'http://acgears.com/';date;
Sat Jul 12 15:08:00 PDT 2014
[...]
Sat Jul 12 15:08:35 PDT 2014

So there's your problem. Without any javascript, Magento's literally taking 30-ish seconds to render a page. I'd disable all your custom functionality and/or install a stock Magento to see if it shows the same behavior. It not, reenable modules one-by-one until you find the culprit. You also might google around for profiling Magento.

My guess if you're on a server without the specs to run Magento. Magento has a unique performance profile among PHP applications. Most standard shared hosting outfits make their money hosting static and/or Wordpress sites that don't get any traffic. These companies either can't handle Magento hosting, or say they can so they can bait/switch you up the chain to a more powerful hosting plan.

Best Answer

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