I don't know why, but I find HN pretty slow for a page that only shows 30 links. Engadget takes about half the time to load. Granted this is with Adblock and WidgetBlock, which I use to block all 3rd party connections besides Disqus, but HN doesn't use any of that anyway, so it's still strange.

HN does no output buffering, causing rendering time to often be closer to 5 seconds than 100ms in Europe. This is trivial to fix, but I guess the SFO crowd don't feel the pain so it probably never will.

Edit: nope, that's not it. Using the fastest UK machine with clean net available to me, tcpdump never shows more than 1 unacked packet on the wire at any time, gzip is turned off, and keepalive is turned off. Gzipping the 24k home page drops it to 4.3k.

None of this really accounts for the crazy jitter we see in Europe while rendering the main table.

Sat in the UK I don't see anything like a 5 second render time for HN, maybe 1 second at most.

For me:

The top half of the page draws instantly in Chrome, then the bottom half.

In firefox, the page draws incrementally, line by line.

In IE9, the whole page draws pretty much instantly, much quicker than FF or Chrome for me.