askbot's pages take a lot of time to load. For example the average latency of this page was close of 1100 ms which is huge
Network latency was 1065ms (responseEnd - fetchStart).
The page took 1688ms to load after it was received from the server (loadEventEnd - responseEnd).
Navigation and page load took a total of 2753ms (loadEventEnd - navigationStart).
is there a way to reduce the latency?
Most likely it is due to the way you deployed.
Please check - are you serving media from Python? (all media should be served by a webserver directly)
Is your system swapping memory?
Initial startup - just the first hit will take longer due to compilation and determination whether you changed media, currently we do it by calculating hash of the content of the media dirs, there may be a faster way to do it. If you have multiple processes - each will consume extra time on response to the first web request.
Comments
Notice that all the js files in the production mode are loaded in the end of the page - that will reduce the apparent page load time. We are now working on spriting all images so there will be fewer requests to load the media files.
See also: http://askbot.org/en/question/711/how-to-improve-the-speed-of-askbot
I recommended you use some of the tags I used "speed" and "profile" so these appear as related questions. I dont' have enough karma to edit your tags.