Another factor that will affect the appearance of load time is the HTML construction of the page. Depending on the speed of your machine at home vs. your machine at work and the browser you're using, you can see vastly huge differences in load time, even on the same connection.

As point of reference, the Monastery Gates uses 14 tables, some of them nested, and at least 6 tables on most other pages.

The more tables you have on a page (especially nested ones), the more work it takes your browser and therefore your PC to render the page. Having to use tables like isn't anyone's fault here, or even at EveryDevel. It's needed to make sure that every user coming to PerlMonks can browse the site, even if they're using Netscape 3.

Maybe once everyone's browsing with fully CSS compliant browsers (and who knows how long that will take, if it will ever occur) we can move beyond using tables to something more DHTML-ish.