Question

My index resource takes up half my sites load time. Google got it down to just about 30-50 ms, how would I go about achieving this?

Also, how can I parallelize the downloading of my images. They all wait for the previous one to load before starting to load, any way to fix this?

Thanks!
~ Jackson

Answer 1

Are you geographically located in relative proximity to the server this page is hosted on? If not, then the long wait time you’re looking at (before the darker shade of blue, where data is actually being transferred) is bound to be longer. Since it’s the first document served to you, a connection between the server and your computer first has to be established, the length of which depends on that proximity, along with the server’s responsiveness (is it a high-load server? are pages created dynamically?).

Google has many, many servers placed strategically around the globe to ensure fast-loading pages for just about everybody; you can’t compete with that, but what you can do is make sure you’re hosting in a location nearest to where most of your audience is located.

As for the parallelization of downloads, you can achieve this by spreading your static resources across several hostnames (e.g. static1.example.com, static2.example.com, etc). Google has a good write-up about this recommendation for pages that serve a lot of static resources, particularly images: http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/docs/rtt.html#ParallelizeDownloads