I’m getting obsessed with optimization of Mahalo. We have a bunch of servers, squid, memecache, image servers, and a great team lead by Mark Jeffrey (who i’ve known for 10+ years).

Right now we are trying to get our very beautiful pages–designed by Jon Hicks, the greatest web designer on the planet for my money–to load in under one second.

If you know about optimization please give us some feedback and thoughts here in the comments. I have a great firefox plugin called FireBug that lets you see load times. Seems like I get 1.5 seconds for our serps, then .7 to 1.2 for second loads of serps (when stuff is semicached).

what load times are people seeing out there?

should we strip the pages down and make them less purdy and more fasty!??!

please let me know!

here is a firebug image showing 1.22 seconds. feedback (click on image look at bottom right)?