Start Render Time

[pmeenan]

Initial connections are all network propagation and short of actually distributing your front-end servers there's not much you can do to speed it up. A CDN makes the connections for static objects faster by putting hosts physically close to the user (speed of light problem, that's the only solution).

The flushing is actually not working from the looks of it (but it would be worth getting it working). The browser will always start parsing the html as soon as it starts coming in which is what you are seeing but what an early flush will get you is it will reduce that first byte time significantly (theoretically could get to be as fast as the connect time but in practice it will always be a little longer).

If you don't see the chunked encoding in the header then the early flush didn't work. The reason is that without chunked encoding the web server needs to know the full size of the response before sending it (and as a result, nothing gets flushed until the whole response is ready). With chunked encoding it can stream the response as it's ready (allowing for early flushing).

Nice work btw, the progress is great.