Start Render Time

[jarrod1937]

Although i am still not sure why the delay helps, but i found out that i can reduce my start render time if i move my initial output flush a bit further up the stack:
http://www.webpagetest.org/result/100621...cfc329380/

The test above simply had the .css output above anything else at an earlier point in the code, which of course makes the code invalid since it is outputted before the doctype declaration... but i can simply move the doctype up too and be good.
Though the odd thing is in order to achieve that start render time i actually had to slow down the processing by 20 ms! If i remove the sleep delay my start render time returns to 1.300 seconds, but if i keep the delay my start render time decreases to under 1 second... Its the weirdest thing ever. The only thing i can guess is that the browser needs some time to process the css before starting the render, which the delay gives it a chance to do before the cpu is bogged down by the rest of the page.