host locally or in the USA?

[pmeenan]

If you have a link to test results I can provide some suggestions why that would be the case but I'm not all that surprised. If your base page is hosted in the US then that's going to be at least half of a second just in round trips to get the base page.

I'd also bet that the local server you were serving static files from is a shared server and probably horribly over-provisioned. It should be blazing fast to serve static files but if the server is overloaded it is probably taking longer than it should to respond (first byte times for static files should be pretty close to the socket connect time).

-Pat