Advice on and experience of GRAV/Gantry first page load timings?

Hello

We have a problem with slow first page load times and would welcome any advice.

Our site is on a shared cloud server at TMD Hosting: Supra theme just under 800 pages.

The base first front page load time is a around 4 seconds. Subsequent loads are usually 1.25-2.5 seconds.

However the first front page load time can sometimes be around 40 seconds (GRAV/Gantry cache not cleared).

The delay is always in the first html part of the waterfall. It's as if the yellow (waiting) part is a unpredictable length of elastic.

Here are some test results after clearing the GRAV/Gantry cache.

You will see the first load after clearing the cache was about 24 seconds. Later runs gave fisrt views around 3.9 seconds and next views around 1.35 seconds.

Is there a way of finding out what's happening during the yellow waiting time? Do you have any ideas one how we can get rid of the 40 second delays.

Thank you for any suggestions.

Ian Russell

PS: TMD have suggested we use Cloudflare but I am not sure that will deal with the underlying problem.

Which plugins do you have on?

I dealt with a problem just like this that ended up being the Related Pages v1.1.4 trying to cache in the middle of a page hit. Then the site would have a 30 second - 1 min delay, then would be very fast after.

We don't have Related Pages but it could well be a caching issue.

TMD made two sets of 'tweaks' yesterday. They have made a difference.

Thank you.

TMD have now announced an upgrade to their installation in Amsterdam (LiteSpeed etc.) promising up to 5 times faster speed!