I've been looking into a lot of things to try and fix it but I have to go to class now... I already skipped my first one. I sent off some mail to people with questions.
I'll post more news when I figure out what's up.
Don't worry --- I won't be happy until pages load as fast as if they were on my local machine. It will be fast... oh yes. :-)
Update: either my fixes from earlier or somebody else's fixes upstream seem to have things running great now.
Another update: There was a bad port on the switch. It was fixed earlier this morning ... that seems to have been the issue.