Decreasing Time To First Byte

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I was running sd3labs through webpagetest.org and noticed that the Time To First Byte was causing for a low score. While there has been some debate about how Time To First Byte is considered meaningless, I decided to see what I could do to improve on it just in case it really does hold some value.

When I initially ran sd3labs.com through webpagetest.org it scored an 83/100 on the Time To First Byte aspect of the test with the following detailed results.

411 ms First Byte Time
249 ms Target First Byte Time

1 2	411 ms First Byte Time 249 ms Target First Byte Time

I looked around and found that simply lowering the ssl_buffer_size to 4k instead of the default 16k in the sites nginx vhost file can greatly reduce the Time To First Byte. I decided to give it a go and with 4k I scored 97/100 on webpagetest.org with the following details.

253 ms First Byte Time
231 ms Target First Byte Time

1 2	253 ms First Byte Time 231 ms Target First Byte Time

So far it does seem a little faster to the human eye and the results seem better without any adverse effects that I can see on the site.

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