: Slow website response? How can I fix this issue? I have pingdom monitor on my website: http://stats.pingdom.com/t68xhgex256f/375513 For North America (big target market) the response time is 1-2

@Bryan171

Relocating the webserver to the US will hugely improve server response time for US users. Investing in better DNS servers will also improve response time, but only for the first request.

The following analysis shows where your speed bottlenecks are at present. (Short version: most of the 1-2 seconds is the time it takes to reach the webserver, not the DNS server.)

Time taken for domain lookup (DNS response)

To determine the speed of the DNS lookup from a computer based in the US, we can use the Unix 'dig' command, or a web-based dig service based in the US, which gives us this response:

; <<>> DiG 9.6.1-P1 <<>> scirra.com
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 39135
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 2, ADDITIONAL: 2

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;scirra.com. IN A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
scirra.com. 3600 IN A 84.45.57.143

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
scirra.com. 165087 IN NS ns1.scirra.hypervserver.co.uk.
scirra.com. 165087 IN NS ns2.scirra.hypervserver.co.uk.

;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
ns1.scirra.hypervserver.co.uk. 3600 IN A 84.45.57.142
ns2.scirra.hypervserver.co.uk. 3600 IN A 84.45.57.143

;; Query time: 489 msec
;; SERVER: 209.68.2.41#53(209.68.2.41)
;; WHEN: Mon Jul 11 09:17:57 2011
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 137


Note the "Query time: 489 msec". That tells us it took 489 milliseconds to resolve the domain name to the server's IP address (which does seem a little slow).

Time taken for server response

Next, we can check how long it takes to reach that IP address from a computer across the pond by using an online traceroute service based in Canada, which gives us the following output:



It takes about 730ms to reach the IP address of your server from Canada.

Conclusions and suggestions for improvement

Now we have enough data to make a conclusion. It's safe to say that the 1-2 second response time you're seeing is largely due to the fact that your server is so far away from visitors in Canada and the US. If a big proportion of your customers are in the US—and you should use your Google Analytics stats to determine this—you may wish to host the site on a server in the US rather than the UK. (You could also keep the UK server and route traffic to the nearest site using a geographical DNS service, but this might be overkill for a small site.)

You could also pay for DNS hosting with a US nameserver host such as DNS Made Easy in order to improve the initial lookup time. You're unlikely to improve it by more than around 300ms or so by doing this, so it might not make as big an impact as moving your server to the US, especially because the DNS lookup happens once per visit whereas page requests to the server are much more frequent, but using a fast DNS server is still worth doing.

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@Gretchen104

(I can't see your DNS figures on that page.) You can use a different DNS provider which provides a better service, you don't have to use the one that comes with your hosting or your domain name registrar.

Yes, it gets cached, so it's not every request.

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