Test Results not looking good. Need some help please.

[GreenGecko]

Was this site written from scratch? If so, then you've got the added complication of no knowing the code quality, and a lack of free bespoke performance enhancements ( eg WordPress W3 Total Cache, Magento lesti::fpc ).

First, it's taking 2 seconds to redirect from carcoverworld to http://www.carcoverworld.com. This should be instantanious, so fixing that will be an instant win.

To address the (now) 1 second TTFB...

You do have things that can be tuned: MySQL, Apache and PHP. MySQL needs feeding loads of memory in relevant places: there's a script called tuning_primer.sh ( many thanks to Matthew Montgomery ) which will provide you with a good starting point for that.

Apache's been dealt with to some extent ( keepalive, mod-compress, etc ). I must admit to being a bit rusty with it, as I find nginx to be a faster, lighter and just plain simpler to work with.

With PHP there are two ways you can improve performance: use an opcode cacher, and feed it lots of memory, and run in FPM mode. The eAccelerator opcode cacher seems to work best with apache, and APC ( the later version built via PECL ) for PHP-FPM.

You'll possibly also gain from a varnish server in front of your site, so it can deliver as much content as possible directly from it's local storage. However, configuring it correctly is not a trivial task.

For the rest of the content, A CDN will perform 2 things: first it'll deliver faster than your (shared) 100Mbit/s internet connection, and second, it'll remove the load off the server network interface - 100Mbit = 12.5MBytes/sec, which can get swamped fairly easily with a heavy graphics site. In addition, the use of sprites will reduce the number of files necessary to build a site, and so also aid performance.

As a shortcut it may be worth playing around with Google's mod_pagespeed plugin, as it has the ability to post-process your site into a more efficient form, including autogenerating sprites, resampling images and so on.

Also, look at image compression, but don't go wild about it at the moment.

http://www.webpagetest.org/result/131126_BE_5WT/ is probably more relevant to your site - better, but... no cigar (:


If you need a hand let me know... Here's my site ( totally irrelevant but looks good! ) http://www.webpagetest.org/result/131126_7D_5XS/