From Italy ping latency is 200ms, but page loading is veeery slow (1.3 seconds for home page, 3 seconds for comment pages if they are not too big).

So I tried form UK (linode server):

https://gist.github.com/820303

Ping latency from linode is 100 ms.

So my bad experience is clearly the combination of two things: HN is slow generating pages, taking something like one third of second to generate the home page. Add this to the latency and you are half a second for the home, and more for than 600 ms for comment pages.

This in the UK. In Italy there is apparently also some bandwidth issue, and since the markup is pretty verbose compared to the content, this could be dramatically improved too.

For instance Google.co.uk is served in 73 ms from the same place.

My blog takes 300 ms from my crappy ASDL (the same where hacker news takes 1.4 seconds).

There are huge margins for improvements.

Site seems to have slowed for me too now. Especially the front page. Gzip would probably help with the bandwidth issue but I don't think that's at fault.

I wonder if pg would accept a yc news written in python/redis :)

I can't propose a so biased implementation ;) A faster HN is already a big enough gift.