Since 21:00 GMT (2 pm PDT) Wednesday, Wikipedia is really fast:

- Static images load in less than one second. - Wiki pages load in 5 seconds (often less than 2). - Recent Changes loads in 5 seconds in 86% of my samples. - No responses ever take longer than 15 seconds.

I don't know what caused this, but I love it. Now I can start to promote Wikipedia more actively.

Note that I'm in Sweden and the server is in San Diego, and the single roundtrip time (ping) alone accounts for 0.25 seconds. Theoretically (speed of light, size of Earth), this could be reduced to 0.10 seconds. Starting "wget", opening a socket (one roundtrip), sending a request, and receiving a response (second roundtrip) containing the Wikipedia logotype, all in 0.70 seconds is pretty amazing. It never took longer than 0.91 seconds in the last 14 hours.