Basic server optimization – Slow server with 1 connection

Question

My server runs incredibly slowly... with no traffic at all apart from myself. I am proxying Unicorn server with Nginx. I know very little about server optimisation. A total of 13 seconds first loading time to 10 on second.

Network:

https://i.sstatic.net/1aHf9.png

https://i.sstatic.net/1S7Vi.png

https://i.sstatic.net/l4IuJ.png

What is the quickest way for me to shave 10 seconds off it?

Note: Assets have not been precompiled.

Edit: If I cut Nginx out of the process and serve directly to Unicorn I'm down to 1.72 seconds. It looks as if Nginx is the great culprit. I still don't have a clue why Nginx is slowing me down so much.

Answer 1

Okay so...

The bottleneck was indeed due to Nginx or rather the interplay between Nginx and Unicorn. It was not resolved until I made Unicorn and Nginx agree on a socket in their respective configuration files.

Unicorn needed this:

listen ENV["UNICORN_PORT"].to_i || 4567, :tcp_nopush => true
listen "#{@dir}tmp/sockets/unicorn.sock", :backlog => 64

and nginx needed an upstream configuration pointing to the socket.

upstream unicorn_server {
    server unix:/home/user/someapp/tmp/sockets/unicorn.sock
    fail_timeout=0;
}

Server first response time is now down to 1-2 seconds.