I hope they find ways to speed things up. When I return to the main page from a story, I have to wait five seconds while items on the front page bounce around as things load. This is on a very fast connection and a mac pro.
They have some extremely poor performance optimizations err NO performance optimizations on the front page. TONS of individual unscaled images loading. Someone might want to introduce them to a product called "Pagespeed"...
It looks like they're running Varnish for caching the pages - is the main issue the images?