Cached, PHP generated Thumbnails load slowly

Question

Question Part A ▉ (100 bountys, awarded)
Main question was how to make this site, load faster. First we needed to read these waterfalls. Thanks all fo

Answer 1

Regarding the delayed thumbnails, try putting a call to flush() immediately after the last call to header() in your thumbnail generation script. Once done, regenerate your waterfall graph and see if the delay is now on the body instead of the headers. If so you need to take a long look at the logic that generates and/or outputs the image data.

The script that handles the thumbnails should hopefully use some sort of caching so that whatever actions it takes on the images you're serving will only happen when absolutely necessary. It looks like some expensive operation is taking place every time you serve the thumbnails which is delaying any output (including the headers) from the script.