Fix the website: A devops success story

PHB: The site is too slow!

Me: Why do you say that?

PHB: This number is too high!

Me: What do you think that number means?

... And so began my long and windy journey to deciphering that metric and how "what everyone knew what it meant" differed from objective reality. 

I'll walk you through my analysis and debugging of a major (comscore top 30) website -- digging through metrics, emotions, facts, lore opinions, and bad statistics.  And then how I fought to explain and eventually fix the number (If not the real problem). 

Round up the usual suspects in this whodoneit: the database, the server, the network, the cdn.

I'll share at a level even your pointy haired boss can understand. 

Keywords: Metrics, logs, wireshark, Ethernet, CDN, mongodb, php, avg-vs-percentile, time-to-first-byte, communication