Hi Markus,
I got the 55sec time while in my office, connected via an Ethernet cable to the university network. This is more or less directly wired up to the backbone of the Internet, so bandwidth cannot be the issue here.
The latency is the main culprit, not bandwidth.
I also noted a big difference in query times when I was in California last summer (my servers are located in Europe).
I now got better times for that query on Chrome (my first try was on Firefox). Maybe the different Javascript speeds are the main issue here.
The Chrome engine is indeed faster than the Firefox engine.
However, most other queries I try still time out or at least don't give any results for some reason, even on Chrome.
Feel free to mail me examples, I can always look into them.
Best,
Ruben