Start Render Time

[pmeenan]

Do you control the server or are you on shared hosting? I haven't had much luck getting it to work on my shared hosting provider but it worked fine on a stand-alone install of apache 2.2 with mod_php.

For chunked encoding to be useful you need to flush the document out early from whatever code you are using to generate the pages (php from the sound of it). Then there's the matter of getting it to actually work through all of the parts of the server pipeline. Recent builds of Apache and mod_deflate both work with chunked encoding but it'll probably take a far bit of experimentation to get it working. They both go hand-in hand and it doesn't help unless you do both (in php you need more than just flush(), you need to look at ob_flush as well.

What it will buy you is reducing the time to first byte on the base page (assuming the time to generate the page and make your back-end calls is not insignificant) which will help with all of your other times.