I just read a nice intro to the new site performance tool (that is currently in labs) on seomoz by a guest blogger scotiasystems: http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/optimizing-page-speed-for-ranking-using-google-tools And decided to check it out in webmaster tools:

The site performance tool looks as vague as all the other webmaster tools stats, but it does have some interesting data:

For one of my US hosted sites (Dedicated hosting on 1 server) I get:
Speed rating of between 0-20 On average, pages in your site take 3.5 seconds to load (updated on Jan 31, 2010). This is slower than 58% of sites. These estimates are of low accuracy (less than 100 data points). (Homepage size is 25.14 KB)
And for comparison a Kenyan hosted site (2 servers with double the hardware specs each AND a load balancer), I get the following stats: Speed rating of between 0-50 “On average, pages in your site take 9.6 seconds to load (updated on Jan 31, 2010). This is slower than 92% of sites. These estimates are of low accuracy (less than 100 data points). (Homepage size is only 6.88 KB – built for mobile)

So the site is really slow to google’s crawlers, but do they take into account that they may be crawling a page from half way around the world? I wouldn’t mind so much if I hosted on a server down the road from Mountain View California, but because this is Africa, I’m a little concerned.

Another issue I picked up is that google’s very own page ads and analytics scripts are picked up as possible solutions to increasing the speed in your page load times, as they suggest:
Minimize DNS lookups The domains of the following URLs only serve one resource each. If possible, avoid the extra DNS lookups by serving these resources from existing domains:
http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js
http://www.google-analytics.com/ga.js
So, make your pages faster by writing your own analytics and ad server, and try to be located close to us, thanks google, very helpful.