The web-server configuration has changed yet again. It used to be highly available with scaling policies and everything but it came at a cost. First of all it carried a price tag, I was using AWS EFS to distribute the files to multiple servers. EFS is a great product but for my use it was also slow. The time to first byte was several seconds. I tried to improve this through memcached and NFS caching utilities but the lowest I got it to was 2.5 seconds to start serving the first byte. Now it is down to half a second and feels much snappier. It is on a single server now with backing EBS as the drive. I’m still running memcached on a seperate instance through AWS’s Elasticache offering. I’m really tempted to stand up an instance on Vultr or Digital Ocean to see how the speeds compare. I will be sure to post the results.
Improved Website
What a great post! good luck with your website