Page elements just waiting to download

[citrustech]

I have two possibly related questions (and I'll apologise in advance since I have also cross-posted in some Drupal forums).

I have a Drupal-based website running on Apache2. We've had performance issues and managed to get page loads down to ~1.4 seconds, but now we're on this I want to improve it as much as we can.

An example load of the homepage

http://www.citrustechnology.com

from this morning (

http://loadimpact.com/page_analysis/citrustechnology.com-e1a02e7f479fb59516c10280e0b6bb27)

leads to my first question.

Why are so many resources apparently waiting before starting to load?

We're configured to use Prefork MPM:

<IfModule mpm_prefork_module>
StartServers 8
MinSpareServers 4
MaxSpareServers 10
MaxClients 100
MaxRequestsPerChild 10000
</IfModule>

Recent changes have been to increase substantially MaxClients. Spare memory is low, but being upgraded tonight. So is there anything we can to be doing to deal with the wait times? Our immediate ideas are to up the Server counts.

My second question is related to another page:

http://www.citrustechnology.com/product/replay-community

(

http://loadimpact.com/page_analysis/www.citrustechnology.com-ad5cf58e20c8a6ea57c1fece495137b7).

It suffers from the same wait issue as the first, but of more interest is the 500ms+, between two clear sets of resources, where it appears to be doing nothing. Is this browser/java script and hence outside of our control?

Any pointers welcome.

Dave

Dave

http://www.citrustechnology.com