Ironside...not that I would use anything but IE, but don''t you think you might be a little biased?
Anyway, I just tried accessing your page from work. Here is the thing. The first time I went to it with IE it took 16 seconds to load. If I then closed IE, cleared its cache and everything, every time after that it took about 1 second to load. I then went to all the other browsers and they took about a second to load too.
I dont think this is a browser issue like I suggested. One of 3 things is probably happening.
One could be that your web server''s hard drive is slow or the system is thrashing it. The first time you request a script thats not already in memory it takes a long time for it to get into memory. Once its in memory it executes quickly. I don''t think this is the situation because other scripts on your site load load much quicker (although the server could be precaching them).
The second possibility is that the server is SO underused that it actually goes into power saving mode and puts the hard drives to sleep. When it receives a request, 20 seconds sounds like a normal time to wake from a sleep. If this site is on a commercial webhost, its unlikely that powersaving would be enabled, but who knows who they have running the servers.
The third possibility is that there is a web cache somewhere between here and there. The web cache may be slow to respond if the file isnt already in the cache. The caching could be done at the web host, at your ISP, or by someone in between. Here at work (a university), we have a 3 layered cache system. We host our own cache, which cascades into out ISPs cache, which cascades into a 3rd cache (don''t know who the 3rd one belongs to).
Ron Frazier
Kronos Software
www.kronos-software.comMiko & Molly - Coming July 2002