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It's not just that. I'm 10ms from most CDNs on a 1.2gbps connection and half the sites I use load instantly (within a couple of refresh cycles on a 120Hz monitor) while the other half take several seconds. The number of round trips the latter sites need just to load some text is insane. Same goes for the 95%ile latency of their servers. You really need to fuck up both parts to achieve such high average latency.

Based on this comment I'm almost certain you have faster hardware than most of your users.

I do and am aware of it. But most of the time it's still server performance.

Show me a slow site and most of the time it's still the server holding it back on old hardware.

> Show me a slow site and most of the time it's still the server holding it back on old hardware.

I was with you but mostly it really isn't hardware.

Mostly it's missing database indexes, n queries instead of a join, and sometimes just one small piece of code that's doing something very inefficiently on every request.

I worked as a client performance engineer in a former life. It is not slow server performance “almost every time”.