C Web Server and Chrome Dev tools question

I recently starting diving into http programming in C and have a functioning server that can handle GET and POST. My question comes in to my site load times开发者_如何学Go and how I should send the response headers and response message.

I notice in Chromes resource tracking tool that there is almost no (a few ms) connecting/sending/proxy/blocking/waiting time in most cases (on the same network as the server), but the receive time can vary wildly. I'm not entirely sure what the receive time is including. I mostly see a long receive (40 to 140ms or more) time on the png files and sometimes javascript files and rarely other files, but it's not really consistent.

Could anyone shed some light on this for me?

I haven't done much testing yet, but I was wondering if I changed the method which I use to send the header/message would help. I currently have every file for the site cached in server memory along with it's header (all in the same char*). When I send the file that was requested, I just do 1 send() call with the header/file combo (it does not involve any string operations b/c it is all done in advance on server start up).

Would it be better to break it into multiple small send() calls?

Just some stats that I get with Chrome dev tools (again, on local network through a wireless router connection), the site loads in from 120ms to 570ms. It's 19 files at a total of 139.85KB. The computer it's on is a Asus 901 netbook (atom 1.6ghz, 2gb ddr2) with TinyCore linux. I know there are some optimizations I could be doing with how threads start up and a few other things, but not sure that's affecting it to much atm.

If you're sending the entire response in one send(), you should set the TCP_NODELAY socket option.

If that doesn't help, you may want to try using a packet capturing tool like Wireshark to see if you can spot where the delay is introduced.