10 +sec to first byte

[jaccobb]

we recently upgraded the version of our store and now we have a slow load time and the vendor wants to sell us an optimization package. I enabled gzip compression but that didn't help. Most of the load time is in the time-to-first byte. There's a long block of java code at the head of one of the css files. Any suggestions on how I might clear this slow load? This seems to be the priority over the other issues, like image compression. Thanks for any advice.

site size: 456 kb
server requests: 34
server type: apache

http://www.webpagetest.org/pagespeed.php...1&cached=0

Details:
First Byte Time (back-end processing): 0/100

11311 ms First Byte Time
ms Target First Byte Time

Defer parsing of JavaScript

433.8KiB of JavaScript is parsed during initial page load. Defer parsing JavaScript to reduce blocking of page rendering.

I saw this code from earlier posts on the site. Would adding that to the body work, as was suggested?

<script defer="defer" type="text/javascript">
window.onload=function(){
var mycode;
mycode=document.createElement("script");
mycode.type="text/javascript";
mycode.src="http://www.example.com/path/yourjavascriptfile.js";
document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0].appendChild(mycode);
}
</script>

</body>