WMT crawl stats vs regional speed tests

[latimer]

In google's Webmaster Tools Crawl Stats we are showing "time spent downloading a page" (in milliseconds) at:
1608 max.
830 avg.
438 min.

We are located in the Midwest.

Checking with Link Sleuth one level deep from my home 20 minutes from the office and pages loading similar to what google shows above. Homepage at 3000 or under, while other pages are under 1000 ms.

What has raised concern is that using the free trial of the Speed Test that tests from 11 different locations, the load times for our homepage are much higher than either link sleuth or google crawl stats indicate. The Speed Test range is 6000 - 10000 ms. nationally (overseas much higher). Tests over the past week have seen a few lower than this range. Lowest being 2500 ms, and quite a few above this range - 12000, 13000 and even as high as 20000 ms. Most of the spikes above the range are from California and Texas.

Have tested a number of other competitors with the speed test and vast majority come in with much better times than our site.

Queston is, are our sites really loading this slow for visitors from outside our region as shown on the speed test, while appearing to load so quickly for googlebot according to crawl stats?

Any thoughts on this appreciated.

[tedster]

If Xenu and Google give you similar measurements, I'd go with that number. If you really were in the 12000 to 20000 area for any significant time, I think you'd notice the effect of that problem in your site stats.