outland88 - 6:31 pm on Apr 11, 2010 (gmt 0)

Well, when I look in WebmasterTools and it says pages of some new client site take 9 seconds to load, and that the site is in worst 7% of sites queried, I am guessing that is a very big hint to do something about it. :)

You're telling me with the experience you have that it takes WMT to tell you how slow a sites might possibly be. After that they're quite a few variables that can't be controlled.