[thelist] responsiveness from "the coffee shop"

[Bob Meetin]

I'm soaking up many of the comments and slowly working down a task list, 
not simply to address coffee-shop performance, but optimization in 
general, and then more specifically reasonable expectations and some 
diagnostics when in unqualified environments.

Some background fodder:  The site in question commonly loads the home 
page in about 2 1/2 seconds at home where I have average 1.5Mbps 
broadband.  The client reported pages loading in 3 1/2 minutes at the 
coffee shot that one day.  I didn't notice any issues that day and the 
logging I set up showed nothing unusual, very low load average.

Just to be sure, the s/a staff suggested I might set up some varying 
crawling delays in the robots.txt.  So for each website hosted on that 
VPS server I'll set up some varying delays.  Reading along, it appears 
that Google doesn't recognize delays, but has it's own thing set up 
through google webmaster tools.  Looking through google's webmaster eyes 
at one of my sites it appears to be configured to:  .016 requests / 
second or 62.5 seconds between requests.  That seems pretty high to me 
already as the general crawl delay recommendations were typically 5 
seconds.  Feedback?

CDN - I'd heard of the infamous Content Delivery Network, but never 
before been there.  Does anyone on the list have any general feedback on 
any noticeable improvement when employed on a CMS?

I'll be testing a number of cacheing/compressing extensions during the 
week - we shall see what this brings.

-Bob