Improving "Waiting (TTFB)" times

Hi there Open Cart community!

I'm running OC 2.3.0.2 with the latest Journal theme installed. No vqmod installed. Site here: alpinmag.ro
Caching is enabled, code is minified, everything looks fine and dandy. Except the time for first byte is over 5 seconds which makes the whole site unusable. Hosting is pretty decent and I've had a conversation with support there as well.

The problem seems to be from Open Cart but I'm not knowledgeable enough to track down the problem. I've read on the forums that some people removed the category count and improved their load times (but were for OC 1.5+), I've found some solution to apply the charset & language directly in .htaccess which I did (seemed to improve the situation a very tiny bit) Looked into this one as well: http://www.nickjulia.com/here-is-how-to ... right-now/ , but it's mostly about OC 1.5+

But overall the TTFB time is horrible. How can I improve it. Where do I start? What can I turn on and off to see what's causing the bottleneck and where?

Any help is greatly appreciated and I'll work through all solutions suggested and hopefully it will help others down the road as well.

Thank you!
Eddie

P.S. Disabling the Journal caching system seems to improve the TTFB times, but has a huge list of CSS & JS resources to load, so basically there are many more calls to the server.

Does it take 5 secs for all files? I mean TTFB for all files 5 secs?

Hi opencartmart,
Yes mostly all pages take over 5seconds to transfer the first byte.

I've turned off Journals caching system and things seem to have improved. What times are you getting when testing the site?

Thanks,
Eddie

How are you measuring ttfb? If from your machine, does Google page speed insights and gtmetrix etc. say the same? Just to eliminate DNS/network issues.

I struggled with a slow ttfb for ages then i moved host and most of my problems went away overnight.

What is the website?

I am using a share hosting and my oc version 2.x. I am not using any caching system. Its TTFB is 500ms

What is your site URL?

Hi there,
Sorry for my late reply, I couldn't log in the forums as it was continuously asking me for a PIN. Somehow it went around all that today.

@sculptex - I've tested the response both from Google PageSpeed Insights and Web Developer console from Chrome. Google PSI always shows times over 0.5s . On Web Developer, by turning off the caching system from Journal I've got it to around 0.5s vs what I had before (over 5s).

I've mentioned the website in the first post. It's www.alpinmag.ro

@opencartmart - I'd still say 500ms is a LOT of time. We should get this down to about 200 but I'm not sure how without breaking OC.

Any ideas, I'm all up for testing.

Cheers!

thats not bad now to be honest. its probably down to your hosting now but i've had a lot worse than that before now!

if your host offers it, use mod_pagespeed to optimize and tweak the other elements (minify, images, caching etc.) its written by google and so does everything to please them.

but that wont help your ttfb.

well, just check here, to find out, what still has to be done, to loosen up all the brakes:
https://gtmetrix.com/
https://tools.pingdom.com/#!/b3ueYA/htt ... caltaminte
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
But since you use OC v.2.3.x and a Journal Theme Extension, the only advise I can give
you is, to check those links below, and download the .htaccess file, to eventually add to
your Shop Performance.

Good Luck
Ernie

http://www.ipc.li/os/htaccess.zip
viewtopic.php?f=190&t=152443&p=583760#p583942
viewtopic.php?f=20&t=160694
viewtopic.php?f=20&t=172286#p653220

Thanks for the replies!

I can solve some of those issues listed on the test sites like minifying, caching, combining files directly from Journal but it makes the pages TTFB get crazy high.

I was hoping for some OpenCart tweaks, or to turn off unneeded functionality from it to improve the overhead.

I don't know... I'm just bobbing for apples.

Any help... helps

Thanks & have an awesome weekend everyone,
Eddie

Well, there is no help, because, according to latest GTMetrix Results, you have NOT
been following the advises, they give you, if you test a Category Page, by example.

There is NO shortcut Solution...
Good Luck !
Ernie

Hi IP_CAM,
I appreciate your answer, but like posted in my previous reply by fixing those, TTFB goes insanely high.

The theme itself has functionality to minify the JS & CSS besides combining them into single files BUT the TTFB goes from 500ms to 5 seconds minimum.

So I can solve THOSE issues but contrary to what's expected I do not fix the TTFB problem.

I am not looking for a shortcut, I'm looking into what I can cut out of OpenCart to improve the TTFB times.

As a side-note, manually minifying all those files will only improve site load times which are of no interest to me right now. I'm interested in cutting down the time until the first byte loads, which is a server hogging specific issue. That's why I'm looking into possible solutions that look at problem from the core of OpenCart.

Thank you!
Eddie

Your problems are unlikely the core of opencart. My vds regularly gives <0.3s ttfb.
It sounds like the caching on journal is messed up!
Try a fresh install of opencart without journal and what are your times?
Caching SHOULD be the best way to reduce ttfb, look at some of the caching mods in the marketplace and check they are journal compatible.