Time to first byte slow on multi-domain setup

[ericfox83]

Hey everyone,

I'm running a multi-domain magento installation (currently on 1.9.1). My websites are running extremely slow. I'm on a dedicated virtual server (in the same country as my customre base) with the following specs:

4 x 2.0 GHz CPU Cores, CentOS, 80GB HDD, Traffic: 4000GB

On my first website, I get TTFB of 933ms to 2sec and on my second website (public_html/secondwebsite) I have a TTFB range of 5-8sec. These times account for about 95% of my load time, so it's killing my site speed, mainly on the 2nd domain.

On the 2nd domain, I use the magento cache, I'm using a flat product file, I have the CSS/JS merged with magento, then I'm using a CDN to minify my css/js/html. I get all A's when I run tests and I've got a score of 93/100 according to Pingdom, but my site speed is slow. 

I paid someone to try to fix this issue and they came back with nothing for me, all they did was turn on CSS merging (which I temporarily had turned off on my own while fixing another issue). 

Anyone have any ideas on why my 2nd site would be so slow? I've gone to my host and they offer no help, I also spoke with the CDN and they were no help (they also took a week to respond). I'm losing TONS of revenue because of customers not wanting to wait for the website to load. 

[JLHC]

You did not mention the amount of RAM for your server? 

Anyway firstly, check if the server itself is overloaded or if it is coping fine. 

Do you have things APC, Memcached, Redis, Varnish, etc installed and tuned in your server? 

Is the server managed by your hosting provider, a third-party or do you manage the server yourself? 

[ericfox83]

I have 3gb DDR3 RAM. 

I'm checking on the APC, Memcached, Redis, and Varnish today. 

[ericfox83]

So i had my server upgraded and i'm not running memcached and google PageSpeed (along with CloudFlare). 

My site speed is still around 5-8sec, with 90% of that being TTFB. Pingdom says it's waiting on the server, but my web host can't seem to figure it out.

However, the domain in the root folder runs lightning quick, it just makes no sense!

[JLHC]

Optimizing the server should be more important than just upgrading it with more resources but without knowing your usage, it can be hard to tell. 

Try running a GTmetrix on your website and see whether your contents are slowing things down? 

[ericfox83]

I've ran GTMetrix on this and everything scores an A except for TTFB. My webhost says TTFB has nothing to do with it, but everything after the first byte loads super quick.