[Max Taxable]

More edification. Long read but very educational:

https://thethemefoundry.com/blog/why...-cdn-spdy-ssl/

On the second line, SSL negotiation time is bothersome. This line represents the download of our site’s CSS file from MaxCDN’s servers. This request involves a DNS lookup (76ms; blue-green), a TCP connection (110ms; orange), an SSL negotiation (429ms; purple) and the content download (243ms; bright green). Notice that the SSL negotiation was roughly 4 times the length of the initial TCP connection. Clearly, the SSL negotiation is not well tuned. We spent a lot of time tuning our SSL connection for speed and now we are suffering from slow SSL negotiation on the CDN. This was not the result I was hoping for when we implemented the CDN.

Another thing to note about the CDN performance (items 2-13, 15-16) is that this negotiation is repeated 3 times. Additionally, we incur extra DNS lookups, which slows our asset loads. Fortunately, the last time, I believe that the SSL negotiation uses SSL resumption and it is much quicker. Finally, notice the diagonal waterfall of the elements. We are seeing the same serial download pattern that we saw in our pre-launch site tests.