I have a question about WebPageTest – what kind of CPU is it “simulating”? I find it odd that in your discuss.samsaffron.com example there’s this big pink block which I assume is browser rendering, CPU loading?
On my machine when I navigate to http://discuss.samsaffron.com/ I can barely get through
- one one thousand…
- two one thousand…
by the time I get to the middle of “two one thousand”, your site is loaded (and I haven’t been there in months, so cache had to be super cold.)
I know these are relative numbers, but that seems like a big difference from “3.5 seconds” in practice. Seems like you can take the “real world” times WebPageTest reports and more than cut them in half to get.. real real world times.