Hey guys,
as I’m writing on a new blog post, I’ve been doing some tests on some more or less know German shops from the different european test locations (except Dublin and Gloucester, because they don’t support IE8 and I wanted consistent test conditions).
The result has been, well, unexpected. In general I’d assume that, the further the test locations get away from the shop’s server the slower the time to first byte and load times will be due to latency. I’ll post the test results below including traceroute tests (wanted to be sure, they are really further away - at least by means of routers) and hope for your ideas - my only explanation so far would be very different internet connections to the test servers. The test conditions have been:
[list]
[]IE8
[]DSL speed
[]5 test runs
[]first view only
[/list]
Tests were run on http://www.strenesse.com/ which is hosted in Hannover, in the middle of Germany. 
Amsterdam (11 hops):
[list]
[]First Byte: 1.632s
[]Start Render: 5.216s
[*]Load Time: 7.854s
[/list]