The handshake adding 300ms before a byte arrived

A checkout flow in Auckland felt slow on first connection. The page was fast once loaded, but the very first request took 480ms before any HTML appeared.

We optimized the connection setup at the edge:

— Measured: full TLS handshake plus a second round-trip was eating the time, terminating at a distant POP
— Confirmed TLS terminated at the nearest Auckland POP, not back at origin
— Enabled TLS 1.3 to cut the handshake from two round-trips to one
— Turned on session resumption so returning visitors skipped the full handshake
— Enabled HTTP/2 so all assets shared one connection instead of opening six

Time-to-first-byte in Auckland dropped from 480ms to 150ms. The handshake was the hidden tax — terminating TLS at the edge and using 1.3 removes a whole round-trip across the ocean. First-connection speed is where edge geography pays off most.

The number that mattered: 330ms shaved off the very first request.