[Plugin: W3 Total Cache] Cache plugin slowing down site??? Please help.

Just a quick note that all of the different testing services will return different results, so they aren’t always going to give you the same score (all 88s, for example). They will also test for different things relative to the speed of your site & give you slightly different recommendations.

Your site is loading slow for me right now. Did you turn on Minify at both W3TC and CloudFlare? If so, definitely make sure you’re only using one minify option on the site because having more than one can cause issues.

Hi,

CloudFlare wouldn’t really help with First Byte Time (we actually might make it look worse). Why this happens is here.

“By definition cloudflare will add some first byte time since it needs to go back to your server and process the data but it should be minimal. My algorithm for calculating a first byte time grade doesn’t play nicely with something like cloudflare though so look at the before/after first byte times and compare those directly (doesn’t explain the one long time you had in a repeat view though).

The algorithm for first byte time looks at the socket connect time to get an estimate of the round trip time to a server and then it uses a multiple of that as the baseline and adds 100ms for each letter.

Since cloudflare has distributed edge nodes, they actually make your socket connect time a LOT faster than if the browser had to go back to the original server directly so the baseline is lowered. The actual request still needs to travel back to your server though so it can’t be any faster than it was before (and will usually be slightly slower). The effect that has is that it will lower the grade even if it is actually faster because the round trip time used for the baseline is faster. ”

changing from disk enhanced back to disk worked for me. thanks! i used to get an F with a first byte time of 1.2 seconds. now i get a B with around .5 seconds.

http://www.webpagetest.org/result/120703_SV_50W/

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i’m not sure does it have to do with location as well? if my server is in the east coast and i’m surfing in the west coast my byte time is slow >1 second
my site is summittileonline.com
http://www.webpagetest.org/result/120703_AM_4T1/

if it is the host server that is slow, what can i ask of them? my host is nexuses which has a lot of ram but I’m on a shared environment.

thanks. i turned off database caching and it actually made the site slower
used to be .48seconds
now .53 seconds
also the repeat views are longer from 2seconds to 5.7 seconds
is that normal or should i turn it back on?

http://www.webpagetest.org/result/120703_7F_NP8/

This is because your cache has been cleared and has to rebuild, I am assuming.
Visit your page a couple of times, check other pages, then retest.

Always use the same test location as well.