Cherian's questions

I serve a wordpress blog with nginx http cached to over 99% of the requests with a cache lifetime of 2 days. Here’s a webpage from the site. The webpages have quite a few images and therefore lazy loaded. The average size of the page is just one 1 mb.

The median response size is 10 KB

With speedcurve my TTFB is at a median of 0.6 seconds

Why is it this high?

I am behind cloudflare and all static assets like JS, CSS and images are versioned and cached from cloudflare.

My nginx config has

    sendfile        on;
    # https://forum.nginx.org/read.php?2,280434,280434#msg-280434
    tcp_nopush on;
    tcp_nodelay on;

    #https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/212794707-General-Best-Practices-for-Load-Balancing-at-your-origin-with-Cloudflare
    #https://www.nginx.com/blog/tuning-nginx/
    keepalive_timeout  300s;
    keepalive_requests 10000;

I also have

initcwnd set to 10, initrwnd 10 and ipv4.tcp_slow_start_after_idle=0

Here’s cloudflare’s reporting of the response time from CF to origin

Here’s my webpagetest.org results for a 2G connection

The static website is also load balanced across two machines. One in Fremont and one in Mumbai with Cloudflare doing geographic routing.

Why is it that my TTFB this long and what can I do to reduce it?

Monitoring apache logs with tail –f tends gets very frustrating for the eyes after a while. Are there any tool/options to colorize the log outputs? Maybe signal FATAL with red, etc...

DD-WRT, Open WRT , Tomato or Third-party firmware projects ?

What are the compelling reasons to choose between these?

I used to be a great DD-WRT fan until I realized that the author was deceiving users by publishing it as a OSS, but made it very cumbersome to download the source and change it (requires you to download GB’s of source files) .Also their bandwidth monitoring feature was part of the paid version, which IMHO is a killer. Having said that, DD-WRT just worked. And I think that’s great..