I am building an autocomplete functionality for my site and the Google instant results are my benchmark.

When I look at Google, the 50-60 ms response time baffle me.

They look insane. In comparison here’s how mine looks like.

To give you an idea my results are cached on the load balancer and served from a machine that has httpd slowstart and initcwnd fixed. My site is also behind cloudflare

From a server side perspective I don’t think I can do anything more.

Can someone help me take this 500 ms response time to 60ms? What more should I be doing to achieve Google level performance?

Edit:
People, you seemed to be angry that I did a comparison to Google and the question is very generic. Sorry about that.

To rephrase: How can I bring down response time from 500 ms to 60 ms provided my server response time is just a fraction of ms. Assume the results are served from Nginx -> Varnish with a cache hit.
Here are some answers I would like to answer myself assume the response sizes remained more or less the same.

1. Ensure results are http compressed
2. Ensure SPDY if you are on https
3. Ensure you have initcwnd set to 10 and disable slow start on linux machines.
4. Etc.

I don’t think I’ll end up with 60 ms at Google level but your collective expertise can help easily shave off a 100 ms and that’s a big win.