It's a sign somewhere on the network between you and the site, packets are being lost. The HTTP protocol does a back off and retry algorithm. If the first try, packet sent is lost, it chooses a random amount of time and tries again. This repeats but the random amount of time gets longer and longer. There's no way in hell the site is taking 1 minute to deliver content. I can tell it's delivering several pages per second and the site isn't being taxed at all.
I believe you, that once it starts loading, it's fast. It's waiting for the site to decide to load that tough. I'm on a different network, a different computer, than home. You can obviously see that. It also needs to be at a point between you and me that my connection to Google and Apple aren't connected to, because I often load both sites in other tabs while waiting for ripcitytwo or sportstwo to load.
I don't pay attention to where you are. The times I'm seeing for first byte are expected considering the speed of the server and the network distance between the server and boardman. In fact, the first byte speed is damn near as fast as it would be if you were the only guy hitting the server.
Denny, do you have an ad blocker on your browser? Sometimes the site does stall loading when it comes to the Blazer/NBA banner ads. I know you have nothing to do with this and they are coming from a different server but that could explain why some people are noticing slower load times for the site.
