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Time to first byte

According to Wikipedia, TTFB “measures the duration from the user or client making an HTTP request to the first byte of the page being received by the client's browser. This time is made up of the socket connection time, the time taken to send the HTTP request, and the time taken to get the first byte of the page.”

In short, it is a commonly used performance measurement of how long it takes for the web server to start sending data. It's often misused as a general performance metric: for example, more aggressive gzip compression might increase your TTFB, but decrease your overall page load time. It's useful as a diagnostic indicator though, and this page will go through some common reasons your TTFB might be very high.

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  • Last modified: 2018/11/09 14:27
  • by Erwin Venekamp